topic 1st occurance of space to be removed (Space removal from string) in SAS Programming

1st occurance of space to be removed (Space removal from string)

sahoositaram555 — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:46:55 GMT

Hi Experts,

I have a column such like below:

9 years
1 Week
0 6 year
1 0 Months

1 YEAR 7 MONTHS
5 YEARS
1 YEAR 6 MONTHS

I've some places double or single blanks in the ist space. I would like to remove the ist occuring space(if there are 2 spaces, 1 space to nospace. How to do achieve this? one such example could be: 1 0 years should be 10 years.

Re: 1st occurance of space to be removed (Space removal from string)

Jagadishkatam — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 11:00:25 GMT

You can use compbl function which will compress the double blanks to single blanks

compbl(var)

Re: 1st occurance of space to be removed (Space removal from string)

ChrisNZ — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 11:08:06 GMT

This will always remove the first space:

data WANT; 
  set HAVE;
  STR1 = prxchange('s/ //',1,STR);
run;

STR	STR1
9 years	9 years
1 Week	1 Week
0 6 year	06 year
1 0 Months	10 Months
1 YEAR 7 MONTHS	1 YEAR 7 MONTHS
5 YEARS	5 YEARS
1 YEAR 6 MONTHS	1 YEAR 6 MONTHS