topic Re: how to populate string in reverse order in SAS Programming

how to populate string in reverse order

Aayushi_17 — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 10:43:15 GMT

How to populate the string in reverse order. For example I have a variable under name

Fname

Praveen Kumar

Gowtham Kuppal KK

Hari Haran M

I want the output to be in the required format:

Fname

Kumar Praveen

KK Kuppal Gowtham

M Haran Hari

Thanks in Advance

Re: how to populate string in reverse order

PeterClemmensen — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 10:50:07 GMT

One way

data have;
input Fname $50.;
datalines;
Praveen Kumar     
Gowtham Kuppal KK 
Hari Haran M      
;

data want;
   set have;
   length FnameNew $ 50;
   do _N_ = countw(Fname) to 1 by -1;
      FnameNew = catx(' ', FnameNew, scan(Fname, _N_));
   end;
run;

Result:

Fname              FnameNew 
Praveen Kumar      Kumar Praveen 
Gowtham Kuppal KK  KK Kuppal Gowtham 
Hari Haran M       M Haran Hari

Re: how to populate string in reverse order

andreas_lds — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 12:04:55 GMT

What should happen if the name consists of four words?

Re: how to populate string in reverse order

Amir — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 12:53:47 GMT

I would recommend @PeterClemmensen's solution over the code in this post as it works with any number of names (see question from @andreas_lds).

When I saw "reverse" in the title I just thought how might the reverse() function be used, so just for demonstration purposes, the following produces the required result for the input data provided:

data want;
    set have;

    length name2 $ 50;

    name2 = reverse(catx(' '
                        ,reverse(scan(fname,1))
                        ,reverse(scan(fname,2))
                        ,reverse(scan(fname,3))
                    ));
run;

Kind regards,

Amir.

Re: how to populate string in reverse order

RichardDeVen — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 18:00:41 GMT

You can place the fname word parts, reversely indexed in a loop, in an array (i.e. conceptually a 'reverse/split') and perform a single CATX after the loop.

Example:

data have;
input Fname $50.;
datalines;
Praveen Kumar     
Gowtham Kuppal KK 
Hari Haran M      
;

data want;
  set have;

  array items(0:49) $50 _temporary_;

  do _n_ = 1 to countw(fname);
    items(dim(items)-_n_) = scan(fname, _n_);
  end;

  fname = catx(' ', of items(*));
run;