topic Re: About countw in SAS Programming

About countw

Jianan_luna — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 21:07:56 GMT

For this question, I cannot make sense the answer for wordnum. I think it should be 3. Can you please help me to figure it out? Thanks so much

Re: About countw

SASKiwi — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 01:07:55 GMT

There are 4 words in the text string - 'US' counts as a word too. COUNTW counts words.

Re: About countw

ballardw — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 01:49:57 GMT

COUNTW without any modifiers and just the string will count everything separated by the default list of delimiters as a word. Since comma and space are some of the default delimiters when you do

Countw('Australia, Italy, Austria, US') then the first word is Australia, second is Italy, third is Austria and 4th is US.

In this code:

data example;
   x ='123,ABC, six, B, Pdq, {, #';
   count = countw(x);
   put count=;
run;

The result is 7 because anything delimited by comma and space counts as a "word" even the single characters { and # unless you modify the list of delimiters.

In this

data example;
   x ='123,ABC, six, B, Pdq, {, #';
   count = countw(x,'B');
   put count=;
run;

the 'B' in the countw function modifies the list of delimiters and in this case will use only the letter B as a delimiter. So the "words" become : "123,A" "C, six, " and ", Pdq, {, #".

Re: About countw

Jianan_luna — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 23:08:05 GMT

Thanks so much, for the second example, the value of count is 3, right?