topic Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string in SAS Programming

IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

Helannivas — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:02:12 GMT

I have used coalescec function

(coalescec(Name,' ' )) for this.But it is not working.KIndly help me on this.

Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

Ksharp — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:07:10 GMT

How about:

if name = 'Null' then name=' ';

Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

Helannivas — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:19:39 GMT

In the Expression column I have given this.

I cannot validate this expression.Its throwing error.

I am using SAS DI studio 4.21.

Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

Ksharp — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:39:36 GMT

OK. Try this:

ifc(name='null',' ',name)

Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

Tom — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:45:09 GMT

What do you mean?

In SAS character variables are stored as fixed length and are padded on the right with spaces. I am not sure there is any difference between the terms "null" and "empty string".

Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

dyan — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 14:49:56 GMT

try function

tranwrd (name, "null" , " " )

Re: IS THERE ANY FUNCTION TO REPLACE null TO empty string

mariosegal — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 15:03:47 GMT

I will present this and other things at NESUG this year

the following macro converts all nulls to zeros (that is what I needed) for eitehr a set of variables or for all numeric ones

you can easilly modify it to convert string 'null' to '' (blank) without typing multiple lines of code, even if here was a function this is better as you do not need to write 100 of lines to process 100's of variables

I attached a small text file, for some reason I could nto paste code from my sas editor