topic Re: Troublesome quotation marks (TRANWRD function) in SAS Programming

Troublesome quotation marks (TRANWRD function)

EinarRoed — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 09:07:41 GMT

Hello!

We need to remove certain pesky characters from a freetext field we're reading from a source system.

Some of the things we must remove are:

Double double quotation marks (""). To be clear: The single character " two times in a row.
The carriage return symbol identified as '0D'x in SAS

This doesn't seem to work due to the use of ' in 0D'x:

	do chars_to_remove = '""', '0D'x';
		input_string = tranwrd(input_string, chars_to_remove, '');
	end;

Can you please suggest a good way to handle this?

andreas_lds — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 09:41:46 GMT

Try

tranwrd(input_string, trim(chars_to_remove), ' ');

The tranwrd function will insert a single blank even if you don't want it, switching to transtrn or using compbl will solve that issue.

LeonidBatkhan — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:04:06 GMT

To remove "" use transtrn() function with trimn('') as the 3-rd argument:

input_string = transtrn(input_string, '""', trimn(''));

To further remove carriage return symbol along with all control symbols use compress() function with 'c' modifier as the 3-rd argument:

input_string = compress(input_string,,'c');

Hope this helps.