topic Re: Extracting text from string in SAS Programming

Extracting text from string

Krysia24 — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 23:27:13 GMT

I have data that look like this:

Chocolate chips (2)

Brown sugar (1)

Eggs 3

Flour (1)

Butter 2

And what I want is just:

Chocolate chips

Brown sugar

Eggs

Flour

Butter

Basically I want to retain all text prior to a digit or special character without compressing.

Thanks!

Re: Extracting text from string

Reeza — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 23:48:32 GMT

SCAN lets you specify your delimiters, try using all the digits and the opening parenthesis to see if that gives you what you need.
You can also look at the modifiers for slightly simpler code, but this ~~should~~ works.

data have;
input string_variable : & $40.;
cards;
Chocolate chips (2)
Brown sugar (1)
Eggs 3 
Flour (1) 
Butter 2 
;;;;
run;

data want;
set have;

want = scan(string_variable, 1, "01234567890(");
run;

@Krysia24 wrote:

I have data that look like this:

Chocolate chips (2)

Brown sugar (1)

Eggs 3

Flour (1)

Butter 2

And what I want is just:

Chocolate chips

Brown sugar

Eggs

Flour

Butter

Basically I want to retain all text prior to a digit or special character without compressing.

Thanks!

Re: Extracting text from string

Krysia24 — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:43:19 GMT

Thank you! I was using a combination of substr and index and wasn't quite getting what I wanted. Thanks again.

Re: Extracting text from string

ChrisNZ — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:36:32 GMT

Another way is to COMPRESS out all the characters you don't want.