topic Re: Adding a period for middle initials in SAS Programming

Adding a period for middle initials

sasperson1 — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:28:06 GMT

Hello

I am trying to add a period for a name column only when the name shows up as one letter.

data have;

middle_name;

datalines

Tim

Bob

Tina

I tried to do this:

data want;

set have;

if length(strip(middle_name)) = 1 then

middle_name = catx('.', middle_name, 1, 1), substr(middle_nm,1));

run;

but the middle initials show as M.M and I.I

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Definitely am a beginner.

Re: Adding a period for middle initials

ballardw — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:32:37 GMT

Try

if length(strip(middle_name)) = 1 then

middle_name = cats( middle_name,'.');

CATX only places the character BETWEEN things. The CATS will append the period (or other string) and you have already checked that you only want to do that when there is only one character

Re: Adding a period for middle initials

sasperson1 — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:53:34 GMT

Oh thank you! That worked for the most part. I forgot to add that some values will be blank and when I ran this, it added the period to blank values. Is there a way to avoid that? Does that make sense?

M

Tim
Bob

I
Tina

Thanks for your help!

Re: Adding a period for middle initials

ballardw — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 19:38:18 GMT

if length(strip(middle_name)) = 1 and not missing(middle_name) then

middle_name = cats( middle_name,'.');

Re: Adding a period for middle initials

sasperson1 — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 13:57:16 GMT

Thank you so much! That worked.

Cheers!