Record IDs have trailing characters, how to remove?

[Marina Feffer]

Hello,
I am working on a dataset that has multiple record IDs with suffixes (RecordID x2, x3, x4, etc) to denote which instance of procedure the observation is denoting. I want to drop the x2, x3, x4, etc off the end of the record IDs so that I will have duplicate IDs. (I'm planning to cluster by ID later on in my analysis) .
I'm not sure how to get rid of the trailing bits after my record numbers. Can anyone help with this?
Thanks!

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Marina:
welcome to this forum.
Do you mean something along the following lines?

. set obs 1
Number of observations (_N) was 0, now 1.

. g Alfa="RecordID x2"

. split Alfa , p("")
variables created as string: 
Alfa1  Alfa2

. list

     +--------------------------------+
     |        Alfa      Alfa1   Alfa2 |
     |--------------------------------|
  1. | RecordID x2   RecordID      x2 |
     +--------------------------------+

. drop Alfa Alfa2

. list

     +----------+
     |    Alfa1 |
     |----------|
  1. | RecordID |
     +----------+

.

[Marina Feffer]

Perfect! Thanks so much for your help!