Replacing "&" with just an ampersand "&"

[Adam Sadi]

Hi,

I am looping across several files to clean some datasets imported from Excel. I want to match each of my firm names with a mapping table so I can get their ID. However, some firm names have this expression ""&" instead just a normal ampersand, so the match won't perform correctly.

I tried this code:

foreach si of local site {
foreach file in `files_`si'' {

foreach var of varlist name* {
local amper = strpos(`var[1]', "&")

set tr on
if `amper' > 0 {
replace `var' = subinstr(`var', "&", "&", .)
set tr off
}

tempfile `file'_CLEAN
save ``file'_CLEAN'
}

Now it seems to work for *some* files because the tracer gave me this result when the code was running :

- else if `amper' > 0 {
= else if 232 > 0 {
replace `var' = subinstr(`var', "&", "&", .)
}

However when I try to open the first of my many files (just out of curiosity, because I knew there was a problem like this in the first file)

use `file1_CLEAN', clear
dataex name16, count(1)

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str36 name16
"xxxxxxx & xxxxxx"
end

What did I do wrong here?

[Nick Cox]

`var[1]' isn't going to be interpreted as `var'[1]

But the intent of that isn't clear. You are trying just to look at the first observation. Is that going to be enough scrutiny?

The code

replace `var' = subinstr(`var', "&", "&", .)

won't do any harm if no occurrences are found, so you don't need to check beforehand whether you need it.

[Adam Sadi]

Dear Nick:

Indeed, I am trying to look at the first observation because I want to name my variables from the firms' IDs and in order to do so, I must replace the *correctly written* firm names with their ID first. And it's a wide format hence the many name?? variables.

Even after I corrected the typo you mentioned in the first line of #1, the code still didn't work until I removed the -if- programming command as you advised. By any chance, do you know why is that? Thank you for solving my problem!

[Nick Cox]

Sorry, but I can't add helpfully to my previous comment.

On the face of it

`var[1]'

shouldn't work but the implication of #1 is that it does. On the other hand your code blocks don't include any else statements but the implication of #1 is that there is at least one.

Perhaps you are using different versions of the code and/or not showing us all the code, and that's likely to confuse readers in practice, although not on purpose.