topic Re: removing first unwanted/non alphabet characters in a column in SAS Data Science

removing first unwanted/non alphabet characters in a column

Cyndia — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:25:40 GMT

the have dataset is like the following (the name Liz has one blank space in front of it; Sam has / in front of it):

name city state

Liz NY NY

/Sam SJ NJ

Norm LA CA

Gloria SC MN

want to have the first non-alphabet character removed, so the table will be :

name city state

Liz NY NY

Sam SJ NJ

Norm LA CA

Gloria SC MN

what do you use to remove the unwanted characters/spaces? Thanks.

Reeza — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:35:34 GMT

Try the compress function with the appropriate modifiers or characters for your code.

name=compress(name, , 'kad');

Can also look into the anypunct functions if you wanted as well.

Ajay — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:39:01 GMT

Yea, compress. Though it works on the whole string, not just the first letter.

data a;

input name $;

datalines;

Liz

/Sam

nancy

/Gloria

;

run;

data b;

set a;

newname = compress(name,'/');

run;

Cyndia — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:05:35 GMT

works for me! thanks.

bharathkumar — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 17:25:56 GMT

Hello,

You want to remove only special character. But before solution was it removes only "/" and also it compress all the "/".

please check this below solution.

data t;
infile cards;
input a $;
datalines;
/ag
a/g
ag/
/gh
;
run;

data t1;
set t;
if anyalpha(a) ne 1 then do;
a1=compress(a,substr(a,1,1));
end;
else a1=a;
run;