topic Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence in SAS Data Science

scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

mlogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:11:45 GMT

Hi All,

Can anyone tell me how do I remove everything including the first period (.) and space from the onservation?

ID Description

101 1. My Name is John

202 10. I am a boy. I go to school

302 502. I work. I read.

My final output will be:

ID Description Description2

101 1. My Name is John My Name is John

202 10. I am a boy. I go to school. I am a boy. I go to school.

302 502. I work. I read. I work. I read.

I wrote the following code, but it does not help if period (.) and space occurs second time.

data out;

set have;

Description2 = scan(Description,2,'.');

run;

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

Jeff_DOC — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:15:55 GMT

I too have the same issue so I will be interested to see what the solution might be.

I have a text field that can contain the word "ZIP" somewhere in the string. I need to remove everything from the word ZIP to the end of the string. The word ZIP can occur anyplace so I'm not at all sure how to do this.

Thanks for asking the question. I'll follow and hopefully it will work for me as well.

Jeff

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

RobertWoodruff — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:20:54 GMT

Description = substr(Description, 1+index(Description, '.'));

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

mlogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:40:25 GMT

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your code. I worked, but still leave a space at the beginning of the sentence. Can you please tell me how to fix.

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

ballardw — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:43:47 GMT

Description = substr(Description, 2+index(Description, '.'));

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

RobertWoodruff — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:48:19 GMT

Different ways to handle this. A general method could be this:

Description = strip(substr(Description, 1+index(Description, '.')));

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

mlogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:52:16 GMT

Thanks a bunch Robert, it worked!!!

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

mlogan — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 19:58:55 GMT

HI Robert,

can you please tell me what does this 1+index function does?

Also just found out from the other member that 2+index also does eliminate the space.

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

ballardw — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 21:42:40 GMT

The index function returns the position in the searched string of the start of the target string. Since that is a number then you can do arithmetic to adjust a position.

For example:

1. My Name is John

The . is in position 2 and that is what Index returned. Add 1 and it gets the position of the space after the first '.'

So the result of starting at position 3 with the Substr function is " My Name is John".

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

Jagadishkatam — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 02:58:23 GMT

You may also try the pearl regular expression

data have;

input id description &:$200.;

description2=prxchange('s/\d+[.]//',-1,description);

cards;

101 1. My Name is John

202 10. I am a boy. I go to school

302 502. I work. I read.

;

Thanks,

Jag

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

Patrick — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 04:20:31 GMT

You could also search for the position of first character which is an alphabetic character - findc(description,,'a') - and then substr() from there.

SAS(R) 9.4 Functions and CALL Routines: Reference, Third Edition

data sample;

infile datalines dsd dlm='|';

input id description:$40.;

description2=substrn(description,findc(description,,'a'));

datalines;

101|1. My Name is John

202|10. I am a boy. I go to school

302|502. I work. I read.

;

run;

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

Ksharp — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 04:23:34 GMT

Code: Program

data have;
input id description &:$200.;
description2=prxchange('s/^\d+\.\s+//',-1,description);
cards;
101 1. My Name is John
202 10. I am a boy. I go to school
302 502. I work. I read.  
;
run;

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

mlogan — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 00:41:50 GMT

Thanks Xia, that's helpful!

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

mlogan — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 00:42:33 GMT

Thanks Xia, that's helpful!

Re: scan and remove the first few character of a sentence

AnnaBrown — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 17:36:17 GMT

So glad you're getting some help, mlogan!

Please mark correct or helpful answers for other community members' reference.

Many thanks!

Anna