topic How to find fields with trailing or leading space in SAS Programming

How to find fields with trailing or leading space

sasthebest — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:20:49 GMT

I have a field named Product with some fields having trailing and leading spaces. What code should I use to spot all the products with leading and trailing space out of million observations?

The spaces below are denoted as ...

Product

Milk..

..Banana

Orange..

Pear..

Re: How to find fields with trailing or leading space

Tom — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:51:38 GMT

SAS stores character strings as fixed length fields so any short string is padded with spaces to the length of the field. Hence there is no such things as "trailing" spaces. To find character strings with leading spaces just test if it starts with a space.

if product =: ' ' then do;

....

end;

Re: How to find fields with trailing or leading space

PGStats — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:55:01 GMT

Trailing spaces are inconsequential in SAS as it only handles fixed length character strings; i.e. all character strings are padded with spaces. The number of leading spaces is given by LENGTH(Product) - STRIP(Product).

Re: How to find fields with trailing or leading space

Haikuo — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 21:47:39 GMT

If what you mean "trailing" is to find how many blanks are padded, you could try:

lengthc(product)-length(product);

Haikuo