Question

I have a csv file that has rows that I want to split by commas using Stata. However, I only want to split by comma if there is not a whitespace directly after the comma.

For example, the input looks like this:

ID Name
1  Bob 
2  Robert,Joe  
3  Mike, Jr.
4  Alfred, Sr.
5  Andy,Michael,Bo

I want the output to look like:

ID Name
1  Bob
2  Robert
2  Joe
3  Mike Jr.
4  Alfred Sr.
5  Andy
5  Michael
5  Bo

Such that a new row is created when there is no whitespace after the comma, but a new row is not created when there is whitespace directly after the comma.

Would greatly appreciate any clarification you can provide!

Answer 1

This regex should work /,\S/

When I checked out the documentation I couldn’t see exactly what is supported.

So if the above doesn’t work then /,[^\s]/

And as a last resort but I hope one of the non whitespace checks work would we to split on
, followed by an alphanumeric character /,[a-zA-Z0-9]/