Remove leading "0"

[Peter Li]

Dear all,

I have observations entries that look like this:

I'd like to remove the leading "0"s from the school codes. I can't simply destring it because that are alphabets.

I tried:

 gen high_school_code1 = subinstr(high_school_code, "0", "", 1)

but it removes 0 from "50018" also, so I ended up with "5018".

Any help is very much appreciated!

Best,
Peter

[Andrew Musau]

* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str5 var1
"A2000"
"02555"
"01010"
"777"  
end

gen wanted=cond(!missing(real(var1)), string(real(var1)), var1)

Res.:

. l

     +----------------+
     |  var1   wanted |
     |----------------|
  1. | A2000    A2000 |
  2. | 02555     2555 |
  3. | 01010     1010 |
  4. |   777      777 |
     +----------------+

[Peter Li]

Andrew, this works great. thanks!

In the meanwhile, I used the following command to create the same results.

gen high_school_code = subinstr(high_school_code, "0", "", 1) if substr(high_school_code, 1,1)=="0"