topic Re: Get the first two words in a string in SAS Programming

Get the first two words in a string

MarcTC — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:03:29 GMT

Suppose this string is:

s ="Amy,Jeff,Paul,Mary"

I can get the first two words using Scan function twice:

w2 = scan(s,1,',')||scan(s,2,',');

Is there any single function call which can accomplish this?

Re: Get the first two words in a string

chang_y_chung_hotmail_com — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:12:20 GMT

Of course. Here is one, assuming a "word" means something delimited by a comma and possibly the beginning and ending boundaries of a character value.

data _null_;

s = "Amy,Jeff,Paul,Mary";

w2 = prxchange("s|^(.+?),(.+?),.*|$1+$2|",1,s);

put s= w2=;

run;

/* on log

s=Amy,Jeff,Paul,Mary w2=Amy+Jeff

Re: Get the first two words in a string

MarcTC — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:25:10 GMT

Thanks, expert!