How to extract first letters and numbers from a character variables

[lalohg]

Hi there,

I have a character variable with letters numbers and hyphen sign and would like to extract the letters and the first two digits before the FIRST hyphen sign and create a new variable identifying these people, here is an example

Variable ID looks like:

0165218-09
0165218-09
0165218-09
13-06-0290
SP131536-01
SP131536-01
0142135-02
0142135-02
0142135-02

The new variable will look like

13

SP

SP

all your help will be appreciated

Thank you

[ballardw]

Do you have any that start with one letter: S12345-67? Or one numeral then the hyphen: 1-234-456? If so how are these processed?

[Steelers_In_DC]

The first two characters will be:

new_var = substr(variable,1,2)

I'm not sure what you are getting at with the hyphen.  If the hyphen is important for another reason you might have to use something in addition to this like scan().

[lalohg]

Thanks for your answers

ballardw: no, I don't have IDs starting with only one letter or one numeral

The IDs starting with SP indicate a type of affiliation (thanks Mark! I can identified these people now creating the new_var), those with two digits and then the hyphen have a different affiliation as those starting with numbers but with hyphen at the end like -01, -02 etc, but I still need to separate these latter two groups

Thanks again for your help