topic Transform a charcter to a numeric in SAS Programming

Transform a charcter to a numeric

jacksonan123 — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:28:16 GMT

If I have a character value called epspropl=45.5c and I convert it to a numeric by:

vepspropl=input (epspropl,8.);

My question is since it contains an alphabetic character c, is there a way to convert epspropl to a numeric and get rid of the unwanted c or do I have to do something else to get rid of the c?

Re: Transform a charcter to a numeric

PaigeMiller — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:33:48 GMT

You could use the COMPRESS() function to get rid of all characters before you use the INPUT function. The 'a' modifier of the compress function eliminates characters but not numbers or decimals.

vepspropl=input (compress(epspropl,,'a'),8.);

Re: Transform a charcter to a numeric

ballardw — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:37:30 GMT

One way:

data example;
   epspropl="45.5c"; 
   vepspropl=input (compress(epspropl,,'a'),8.);
run;

compress removes characters from a string. In this case it removes all alphabetic. If you don't want that and only want a c removed

data example;
   epspropl="45.5c"; 
   vepspropl=input (compress(epspropl,'c','i'),8.);
run;

the 'i' says to ignore case when removing c, so would remove both upper and lower case c's.

Re: Transform a charcter to a numeric

Krueger — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:41:02 GMT

data have;
	input a $2. b $3. c $3.;
	datalines;
1a 2b 3c
	;
run;

data want;
	set have;
	test = input(compress(a, '', 'a'), 2.);
run;

Re: Transform a charcter to a numeric

Tom — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:47:29 GMT

You have to do something to tell INPUT() not to read the letter.

So you could remove the C from the string using say COMPRESS(). Like compress(epspropl,'c').

If it is just the last character you could use SUBSTR() or the informat.

Like substr(epspropl,1,length(epspropl)-1).

Or just tell it to only use the first 4 characters. Like: input(epspropl,4.) or INPUTN(epspropl,cats(length(epspropl)-1,'.'))