topic Re: Intentional truncation of data in SAS Programming

Intentional truncation of data

mkd — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 21:38:41 GMT

I have data that includes the name of a town in parenthesis. I want to get rid of what's in the parenthesis. Is there a way to do this in SAS...or does it need to be done outside of SAS?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Intentional truncation of data

stat_sas — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 21:44:20 GMT

Please show some sample data.

Re: Intentional truncation of data

ballardw — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 23:04:51 GMT

One approach, inside a data step is to include code similar to

Variable = substr(variable, 1,(index(variable,'(')-1));

Re: Intentional truncation of data

arodriguez — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 11:02:00 GMT

I will select the first word separated by "(" character with an scan function in the datastep

newvar=SCAN(var,1,'(');

Re: Intentional truncation of data

user24feb — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 11:30:29 GMT

Depending on your actual data, this might work (kicks out ( and ) without replacement):

Data A;

Ex="xxxcd(1dfd32)"; Output;

Ex="gegewx1d (322)"; Output;

Run;

Data B;

Set A;

Ex_new=PRXChange("s/[\(\)]//",-1,Ex);

Run;

Re: Intentional truncation of data

mkd — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 14:59:12 GMT

This was very useful and did what I needed. Thank you for answering, however, I found the SCAN function much easier to use and most likely easier for me to remember in the future.