topic Removing occurring in SAS Programming

Removing occurring

librasonali — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 13:09:34 GMT

Hello Everyone,

PFB input and desired o/p data where the repeated/duplicate alphabet gets removed. let's suppose there is huge data then how can we do? for few records it can be done via tranwrd but how for huge data. ?? Thanks in advance !

	input data
Field_Id	Name
1	Josse
2	Aangeyy
3	Suusa
4	Henryy
5	Johnn
6	Joose

	Output data
Field_Id	Name
1	Jose
2	Angey
3	Susa
4	Henry
5	John
6	Jose

Re: Removing occurring

PaigeMiller — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 14:06:41 GMT

What to do when there are legitimate repeated letters in a name, such as the name Matthew?

Re: Removing occurring

andreas_lds — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 17:41:02 GMT

The whole task looks like homework, because in a real-world-scenario names exist that have repeated chars, like Otto or Lynn.

A regular expression in prxchange can solve the problem:

data want;
	set have;
	Name = prxchange('s/(.)\1+/$1/', -1, Name);
run;

Maybe the expressions needs to be explained 😉

(.) matches one char, the parentheses create a capture group.

\1+ matches the the first capture group

$1 return the first capture group - one of the duplicated chars

-1 repeat changing until no more match is found

Re: Removing occurring

PeterClemmensen — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 20:05:48 GMT

Read Removing repeated characters in SAS strings by @LeonidBatkhan .

Re: Removing occurring

hhinohar — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 05:16:44 GMT

Hi @andreas_lds

It doesn't give the correct output. Didn't you mean something like this?

data want;
	set have;
	*search string in lowcase character and then do pattern matching and finally convert it into propcase;
	Name = propcase(prxchange('s/(.)\1+/$1/', -1, lowcase(Name)));
run;

Re: Removing occurring

andreas_lds — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 06:27:42 GMT

@hhinohar: Seems that i forgot to add the "i" option to prxchange:

data want;
   set have;
   Name = prxchange('s/(.)\1+/$1/i', -1, Name);
run;