Hi,

I would like to extract the first number of another variable into a new variable. (And an additional one which contains the first and the second number if there is one)
The existing variable has different length in its values:
e.g.
911
9313
61
521
1
...
I would like to create a new variable containing only the first number from each observation
-> meaning:
9
9
6
5
1

It would be great if anyone had a solution, with which it is not necessary to convert it to a string first (if seen a lot of solutions which do that), because I wanna use it as a numeric variable.

+ another solution which does not work for me (because not all observations have the same length) is this one:

the variable containing the numbers mentioned above is called "ISCO"

gen twodigit_ISCO=int(ISCO/100)


Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!!
Clara