topic Re: kcompress modifier Alternative in SAS Programming

kcompress modifier Alternative

RoHa — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:23:49 GMT

After switching from local to server, we had to change some functions in our programming.

The reason behind this is the utf-8 compatibility. The version we use is SAS 9.4.

One function we had to change is compress to kcompress.

Which is quite painful since kcompress doesn't support modifier.

I've got a program that tries to fix telephone numbers.

data work.DQ;
	Phone='+49O64343565ABC'; output;
run;
data work.DQ; set work.DQ;
	DQ_Phone=compress(Phone,"0123456789+",'k');
run;

Do you have any idea how to extract a certain list of characters from one string and insert it into another without using compress and modifier?

Thanks a lot for any help!

Roman

Re: kcompress modifier Alternative

RW9 — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:31:47 GMT

You don't have to use kcompress, you only use it when the string might contain double or more byte characters - and if you phone numbers contain those I would be worried. Anyways, work around it by something like:

compress(kcompress(phone,""),"01234567890+")

Re: kcompress modifier Alternative

RoHa — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:05:58 GMT

Unfortunately there is a good chance a phone number could contain ä,ü,ö

Re: kcompress modifier Alternative

RW9 — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:17:47 GMT

But those are single byte characters so shouldn't cause an issue for compress?

Re: kcompress modifier Alternative

RoHa — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:30:26 GMT

are you sure? because testing revealed problems with them in the utf-8 environment and I think they are double byte characters. For Example: ä should be 11000011 10100100 in UTF-8 binary

Re: kcompress modifier Alternative

RW9 — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 09:24:28 GMT

If you can provide some example - test data in the form of a datastep - which illustrates your issue I can look, but this:

data have;
  a="abcdäefg1234";
  b=compress(a,"","kd");
run;

Works fine for me.