topic Re: Remove all the "-" or "_" between the text, and compress the text? in SAS Programming

Remove all the "-" or "_" between the text, and compress the text?

ybz12003 — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:54:57 GMT

Hi Experts,

I remember there is a SAS function which could remove all the "-" or "_" between the text, and compress the text? But I forgot which one. My variable is Charastatic. Please advice. Thanks.

Re: Remove all the "-" or "_" between the text, and compress the text?

r_behata — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:59:48 GMT

data _null_;
	want=compress("remove - or _","_-");
	put want=;
run;

25         GOPTIONS ACCESSIBLE;
26         data _null_;
27         want=compress("remove - or _","_-");
28         
29         put want=;
30         run;

want=remove  or

Re: Remove all the "-" or "_" between the text, and compress the text?

ybz12003 — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 13:37:45 GMT

I got it work, thanks.

Re: Remove all the "-" or "_" between the text, and compress the text?

ed_sas_member — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 13:52:34 GMT

Hi @ybz12003

Another possibility is to use the PRXCHANGE function:

data _null_;
	want=prxchange('s/(^\s*|-|_|\s*$)//',-1,"   remove - or _  ");
run;

It looks for the following patterns ^\s*|-|_|\s*$ as many times as needed (-1):

^\s = zero, one or more (*) blanks (\s) at the beginning of the string (^)
\s$ = zero, one or more (*) blanks (\s) at the beginning of the string ($)
an hyphen (-)
an underscore (_)

and replace them by nothing.