topic Re: Removing Special Characters in SAS Programming

Removing Special Characters

1162 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:05:58 GMT

I'm using SAS to extract data from a database. Some of the fields I'm grabbing are text fields that have newline and carriage return characters embedded. I tried to use TRANWRD to remove these characters, but I may not be doing it correctly.

When I import this data into MS Excel, I see that the special characters appear as '\x0a\x0d'. SAS displays this as a pair of boxes.

What is the proper way to remove these newline and carriage return characters from a text field?

Re: Removing Special Characters

1162 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:36:15 GMT

Looks like I answered my own question . . .

I can refer to them as '0D'x and '0A'x in the TRANSLATE function.

Re: Removing Special Characters

Patrick — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:39:15 GMT

TRANSLATE will work, COMPRESS would do the job as well.
If you're ever looking for more difficult replacements then get familiar with regular expressions (PRXCHANGE and the like).
Cheers
Patrick

Re: Removing Special Characters

Peter_C — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:22:17 GMT

should be careful with this kind of data.

why do these special values occur?

Possibly they mean something.

Check with someone who knows that data source, or the service provider

good luck

PeterC