topic Re: How to count the number of characters in a variable? in SAS Programming

How to count the number of characters in a variable?

epibio2021 — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:03:14 GMT

Hello,

I am trying to determine the level of detail in character variables by counting the number of characters in the values.
As an example, variable 'comments' has values like 'very good', 'excellent', and 'poor service'. I want to generate a variable that will count all the characters in the 'comments' variable and will return something like this:

very good - 9 characters

excellent - 9 characters

poor service - 12 characters.

I have to do this for multiple variables, but I don't know how to approach this.

Thank you in advance!

Re: How to count the number of characters in a variable?

Tom — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:08:15 GMT

The LENGTH() function will tell you how many bytes until the last non-blank value. That looks like what you want.

And for single byte encoding it should work. But if you are using a multi-byte encoding, like UTF-8, then some characters take more than one byte to be represented. In that case use KLENGTH() function instead. That will count characters instead of bytes.

Re: How to count the number of characters in a variable?

Astounding — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 22:41:57 GMT

Some of the loose ends that you need to wrap up before programming begins ...

You have already indicated that embedded blanks should be counted. What about leading blanks? Should they also be counted?

Do you have an exact count of how many variables you want to do this for? Is it every character variable in your data set?

You will need to invent variables to hold the results, such as L1 for the length of the first variable, L2 for the length of the second variable, etc.