Eliminating leading blanks from a string

[Titir Bhattacharya]

Hi all,

It seems there are leading blanks for a string variable state in 2 out of 5 rounds of data sets I'm working with. Due to these leading blanks after appending, apparently same value of the string appears twice upon tabulating the state variable.

I tried

keep if state=="XY"

with spaces in different positions and could confirm that the space is on left of "XY". I could also identify the rounds in which these spaces occur by

tab state round

and noting down the sample size under each value.

However when I try

replace state==trim(state)

on the offending rounds, I get "0 real changes made".

Could someone please help me out?

Thanks,

[Andrew Musau]

In case you have characters other than the ASCII space character, try

replace state=ustrtrim(state)

See

help ustrtrim()