I have a dataset with strange variables and I can't work with it. tried "destring", "split" in vain but nothing. Basically I want to turn them to numeric so that It will allow me to create others variables depending of them. In fact, the exercice asked to work with the variables school (distance btw school and home), area(identify the region of the household, (1) for urban,(2) for semi rural...) , id (number of children from one age to another for each household) and e0,...,e17 ( e0= number of children from age 0, e1= number of children from age 1 etc). I will be the happiest man in the world if I get a solution from. Thank you


variable name type Display format variable label
genidareasch~7e byte %8.0g gen;id;area;School;e0;e1;e2;e3;e4;e5;e6;e7;e8;
> e9;e10;e11;e12;e13;e14;e15;e16;e17
v2 str55 %55s
v3 str38 %38s