Hi Statalist,

Thanks for being a great forum which already has helped a lot!

I'm new here, quite fresh to STATA and trying to organize a data file this summer for cancer epidemiology research.

In my data file, I have a string variable "Diagnoses" for ICD-codes for various diseases, where the ICD-codes for cancer starts with the letter "C".

I would like to make STATA select all the cancer diagnoses into a separate variable, and have based on a previous thread tried the command

gen Cancer =.
replace Cancer = 1 if word(Diagnoses,1),"C"

but get the error message "type mismatch" here.

When changing to
gen Cancer=""
replace Cancer = 1 if word(Diagnoses,1),"C"

the same error message pops up so not sure if the mismatch is from Diagnoses being a string variable. Maybe I'm doing something else wrong?

Would be thankful for any advice on how to go around this.

Best,
Mary