topic Re: Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line in SAS Programming

Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line

Amy0223 — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 03:15:09 GMT

Hi! How should I answer this question below? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line. Choose any method that works reliably. Regardless of method, assume that a line won't consist entirely of '?'s.

Re: Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line

Reeza — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 03:31:23 GMT

Try and find a function here that will count the number of characters.

The documentation has an example for the function towards the bottom of page.

Hint: You want to COUNT a character.

https://documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=pgmsascdc&cdcVersion=9.4_3.4&docsetId=allprodsle&docsetTarget=syntaxByCategory-function.htm&locale=en

@Amy0223 wrote:

Hi! How should I answer this question below? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line. Choose any method that works reliably. Regardless of method, assume that a line won't consist entirely of '?'s.

Re: Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line

ed_sas_member — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 13:41:30 GMT

Hi @Amy0223

You can use the countc() function for example:

var2 = countc(var1,'?');

Re: Count the number of times the string '?' occurs in variable line

Amy0223 — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 15:05:08 GMT

Great! I got it. Thank you very much!