Deleting blank cells across string variables

[Karishma DSouza]

Hi. I have three string variables with observations that are empty cells/missing across all three. I want to delete only observations that are empty across all three of the variables. I've tried two versions of the code (below), both of which don't work: 1) dropping observations that have missing entries across all three variables; 2) replacing the missing/blank with a "." value.

1) bysort id: drop if varA == " " & varB == " " & varC == " "

2) local X "varA varB varC"

foreach x of local X {
     replace `x'=. if missing(x) 
     }

Any help would be much appreciated

[William Lisowski]

What you need to know is that missing string values are

""

which is a string of length zero, rather than

" "

which is a string of length 1 containing a single blank character.

So

drop if varA == "" & varB == "" & varC == ""

should do what you want.

[Karishma DSouza]

Thank you, William. That did solve the problem.