Extracting a number from a string variable

[Simwinga Simwinga]

Greetings,
How I can extract numbers from a string variable and place them in a separate column. In my dataset, I'd like all these numbers appearing in the variable "province" to be present in a new variable named "Region."

----------------------- copy starting from the next line -----------------------

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input float(province_row district_row) str44(province district) str13 Province
1 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" ""                      "NORTHERN"
0 1 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
0 0 "REGION 01 NORTHERN" "DISTRICT 0101 CHILUBI" "NORTHERN"
end

[Nick Cox]

On this evidence,

gen Region = real(word(province, 2)) 
format Region %02.0f

might be enough.