topic Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell in SAS Data Management

deleting repetitive text within a cell

ilikesas — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:52:12 GMT

hi,

suppose I have the following table:

Comp Name
The company ABC The company ABC The company ABC
The company DEF The company DEF The company DEF

Comp Name

The company ABC

The company DEF

That is, inside each cell I have a repetition, so what I would like to obtain is the deletion of the repetition so that the new table should be as following

Comp Name
The company ABC
The company DEF

Thank you!

Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell

Reeza — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 01:19:54 GMT

SAS doesn't really have cells. Is your data originally in Excel?

Does each variable/row contain the repetitive text or are they separate rows?

Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell

ilikesas — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 01:27:57 GMT

Hi Reeza,

Actually my original data is in Excel, sorry for not mentioning that, and there in Excel each row contains the repetitive text, just as I showed in my table above.

Thanks

Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell

Reeza — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 04:32:21 GMT

What happens when you import it?

Also, can you attach a sample file.

Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell

art297 — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 05:38:29 GMT

Daniel,

Can't say for sure without seeing your sas dataset but, if your file is called have and the variable is actually imported as comp_name, then the following might do what you want:

data want (drop=_:);

length comp_name $40;

set have (rename=(comp_name=_c));

comp_name=scan(_c,1,,'c');

run;

Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell

ilikesas — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 14:14:56 GMT

When I do a proc print of the imported excel file I get:

1	ALCO Stores, Inc. ALCO Stores, Inc. ALCO Stores, Inc

that is, the repetition is put into a sequence

Re: deleting repetitive text within a cell

ilikesas — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 14:16:08 GMT

Hi Arthur,

I did your code and it worked for my sample, here is the result:

1	ALCO Stores, Inc.

Thanks!