topic Re: Removing last 5 characters from a string in SAS Programming

Removing last 5 characters from a string

dber — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:40:52 GMT

How do remove the last 5 characters from a char string regardless of length?

Thanks

Reeza — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:42:36 GMT

SUBSTR() + REVERSE()

SUBSTR() + LENGTH()

@dber wrote:

How do remove the last 5 characters from a char string regardless of length?

Thanks

PeterClemmensen — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:46:11 GMT

data _null_;
   string="abcdefghijklx";
   newstring=substr(string, 1, length(string)-5);
   put newstring;
run;

RW9 — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:48:10 GMT

Just a note that you may want lengthn() to avoid extra spaces at the end.

PeterClemmensen — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:51:56 GMT

Right you are 🙂

ballardw — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:53:38 GMT

data _null_;
   string="abcdefghijklx";
   newstring=substr(string, 1, length(string)-5);
   put newstring;
run;

You may want to check that the length of the string is actual greater than or at least 5 to prevent error messages.

Just in case there are shorter than expected string values.

   if length(string) ge 5 then newstring=substr(string, 1, length(string)-5);

gamotte — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 15:00:51 GMT

or use substrn :

data _null_;
   string="abcd";
   newstring=substrn(string, 1, length(string)-5);
   put newstring=;
run;

novinosrin — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 15:09:07 GMT

If the objective is just to remove and not create a new variable, you can use just this

data want;
   string="abcdefghijklx";
  substr(string, length(string)-5)=' ';
run;