topic Re: How to rename all variable with same occurrences in name in SAS Programming

How to rename all variable with same occurrences in name

jennyshop — Thu, 30 May 2019 20:50:11 GMT

Hi all,

Can someone help me. I want to rename all the variables in a dataset that have a certain value in the name. I have hundreds of variables. For example. address2018, city2018, state2018. Is there anyway I can change them all to address2019, city2019, state2019.

Thanks in advance,

Jenny

Re: How to rename all variable with same occurrences in name

PeterClemmensen — Thu, 30 May 2019 21:16:11 GMT

Hi and welcome to the SAS Communities 🙂

Here is one way

data somedata;
input address2018 $ city2018 $ state2018 $ var1-var3;
datalines;
a b c 1 2 3
a b c 1 2 3
a b c 1 2 3
a b c 1 2 3
a b c 1 2 3
a b c 1 2 3
;

data _null_;
   set sashelp.vcolumn end=lr;
   where libname='WORK' and memname='SOMEDATA';

   if _n_ = 1 then 
      call execute('proc datasets lib=work nolist; modify somedata;');
   if find(name, '2018') ne 0 then 
      call execute('rename '|| name || '=' || tranwrd(name, '2018', '2019') ||';');

   if lr then call execute('quit;');
run;

proc contents data=somedata;run;

Re: How to rename all variable with same occurrences in name

ballardw — Thu, 30 May 2019 22:03:32 GMT

@jennyshop wrote:

Hi all,

Can someone help me. I want to rename all the variables in a dataset that have a certain value in the name. I have hundreds of variables. For example. address2018, city2018, state2018. Is there anyway I can change them all to address2019, city2019, state2019.

Thanks in advance,

Jenny

Or prevent the entire issue by having a variable such as YEAR with the value of 2018 and all of the variables with names like address, city, state.

Then if you have another "year" data it has the same structure and you can append the data and process or model using the YEAR variable for grouping or reporting.

Re: How to rename all variable with same occurrences in name

jennyshop — Thu, 30 May 2019 22:32:17 GMT

Draycut:

It worked. THANK YOU!!!!

Re: How to rename all variable with same occurrences in name

PeterClemmensen — Thu, 30 May 2019 22:39:31 GMT

@jennyshop anytime, glad to help 🙂