topic Re: Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables in SAS Programming

Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables

myboys2 — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:54:14 GMT

I have a text file that is not delimited and my name field looks like this:

JOHN DOE

MARYELIZABETH SMITH

JACKIE DOE

SOPHIE DOE

The field is $50. as name AND there are four spaces in between the firstname and the lastname

How do I parse it to give me FIRST NAME AND LAST NAME

Thank you in advance

Re: Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables

novinosrin — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:57:21 GMT

did you try scan function?

data output;

set input;

FIRST_NAME=scan(name, 1);

LAST_NAME=scan(name,2);

run;

Re: Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables

snoopy369 — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:59:37 GMT

If both first and last name are guaranteed not to have any spaces, you can just use SCAN.

If you specify 4 spaces because you want to treat single spaces as non-delimiters, then you have a few options. The easiest is to use DLMSTR as ' ', I think.

data want;
length first last $50;
infile datalines dlmstr='    ';
input
first $ last $;
;;;;
datalines;
JOHN    DOE
MARY ELIZABETH    SMITH
JACKIE    DOE
SOPHIE    DOE
;;;;
run;

But if you have other fields and want to read them as fixed width, you could read into NAME, then FIND ' ' and then use SUBSTR to parse it, or a perl regular expression.

Re: Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables

myboys2 — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 18:42:17 GMT

thanks I did try what you said and also this and both did not work

first_nm=scan(r_name,1,' '); last_nm=scan(r_name,2,' ');

Re: Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables

myboys2 — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 18:53:14 GMT

I ended up doing this - thank you 🙂
format lname $15.;
format fname $15.;
lname=scan(r_name,1,' ');
fname=left(scan(r_name,2,' '))

Re: Parse a long text field with varying length results to new variables

novinosrin — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 20:26:56 GMT

Ok Good 🙂