Hello,

I have a string variable called relationship that describes the relationship between 2 people. Each observation is a person. I am trying to generate a new variable that consolidates the various spellings into one spelling. In the dataex example below, I would want to generate a new variable called relationship_cleaned with the 4 values shown below equal to "Acquaintance". The only way I know how to do this is:

generate relationship_cleaned=.
replace relationship_cleaned = "Acquaintance" if relationship == " Acquaintance" | relationship=="Acquaintance - former roommate"| ....

Could someone please tell me of a way to do the same thing but rather than writing out all the different spellings, changing the value of the new variable if the variable relationship starts with the characters "Acquaintance"? Thank you very much for your time and help!

input str30(relationship)

relationship
1. "Acquaintance"
2. "Acquaintance - former roommate"
3. "Acquaintance - classmate"
4. "Acquaintances"
5. end