Help with destringing a variable

[Damithri Munasinghe]

Hello,
I'm working with a dataset and I want to destring a variable. This variable is a string but with blank spaces. For context, when i type in codebook I get the following result.

Type: String (str15)

Unique values: 3,972 Missing "": 0/5,949

Examples: "78176 6"
"159120 2"
"239 4 2"
"321139 2"
I tried to destring it but it doesn't work and I get the message 'contains nonnumeric characters; no replace'. I'm not too sure how to proceed with this. Would really appreciate some help!

[Nick Cox]

What is the correct interpretation of these strings? If the spaces are to be ignored, you need to spell that out, as space counts as a non-numeric character.

[Damithri Munasinghe]

hello, its a str15 - %15s

[Nick Cox]

What we need to know is how Stata should read your data: should 239 4 2 be 23942, or something else? Why are spaces present any way?