Delete portion of a string following a unique set of characters

[Clay Bavinger]

I have a string variable with many observations. Some of the observations have a set of characters, //////, that is then followed by some more text, but different text in each case. I would like to delete the /////// and what follows. I'm hoping to find a way to delete starting at /////// at anything after, but to keep what comes before the ///////.

Here's is an example:
oldstring:
xxxxxx///////skflajf
rrrr333///////dosifjw
wwwwww

newstring:
xxxxxx
rrrr333
wwwwww



Thanks!

[Nick Cox]

Try gen newstr = substr(oldstr, 1, strpos(oldstr, "///////")-1) Where the number of slashes should be what you want (I'm using a small device to read this).

[Nick Cox]

Plus replace newstr = oldstr if missing(newstr)

[Robert Picard]

And here's how you can do this using regular expressions

gen newstr = regexr(oldstr,"///.+","")

The pattern "///.+" will match a substring that starts with "///". The following "." is a wildcard that matches any single character,. The "+" will match one or more of the preceding character. The matched substring is then replaced with an empty string.