How do I find and replace a part of a string variable in Stata?

Question

I am working with a variable which is basically URLs. So observations include values like for example

• www.google.com
• https://www.google.com
• https://yahoo.movies.com

I am trying to create a do file to import a bunch of these files into Stata and need a reliable method to remove the www. and the https:// parts from these variables over a wide range of URLs.

In Excel I can do this simply by finding https:// or www. and replacing it with nothing, how do I achieve the same in Stata?

I am working in Stata 13.1 SE on Windows 8 Pro 64 bit.

Solution

You can use subinstr() function.

Example:

subinstr("this is this","is","X",.) = "thX X thX"