Remove part of string before a character

[Todd Motiwalla]

If I have string var with many entries that have the following: "numtimes15:blue", "numtimes2343:red", etc., and I wish to always remove everything before the colon (including the colon), what is the most efficient way of doing that? I tried first with subinstr() but because there are different characters that come before the colon it was not successful.

[Clyde Schechter]

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input str16 var1
"numtimes15:blue"
"numtimes2343:red"
end

gen colon_pos = strpos(var1, ":")
gen wanted = substr(var1, colon_pos+1, .)

[Hemanshu Kumar]

Or with regular expressions:

gen wanted = ustrregexra(var1,"^(.+):","")

[Bjarte Aagnes]

If "efficient" is running time, a faster regex solution is

gen wanted3 = regexs(1) if regexm(var1,":(.*)")

#2 is fastest (2 mill obs / 10 reps):

. timer list
   2:      3.31 /       10 =       0.3313    strpos() + substr()
   3:     34.89 /       10 =       3.4894    ustrregexra(var1,"^(.+):","")
   4:      7.72 /       10 =       0.7716    regexm(var1,":(.*)")