topic Getting values in one column in SAS Programming

Getting values in one column

Pritish — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:30:40 GMT

Hi All,

I know this is a very stupid question to ask, but I am bit confused with the following:

How can I get the First Name and Middle Name in the same column and Last name in a different column?

As I don't have double space before the last name so I can't use '&' in my INPUT statement.

Data Sample;

Input First_name $ Last_Name;

Cards;

Nadal Anthony Samuel

John Beth Goodrich

;

Run;

Result:

First_Name Last_Name

Winston Anthony Samuel

John Beth Goodrich

Thanks for your help!

Getting values in one column

art297 — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:41:44 GMT

I'm sure there are a number of ways to do it. If you ALWAYS have first and middle names then you could use something like:

Data Sample (drop=Middle_name);

length First_name $30.;

informat First_name Middle_name Last_Name $15.;

input First_name Middle_name Last_Name;

First_name=catx(' ',First_name,Middle_name);

cards;

Nadal Anthony Samuel

John Beth Goodrich

;

Getting values in one column

Tom — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:45:53 GMT

This is actually a difficult problem to handle properly as some last names include spaces.

data sample;

input @ ;

length first_name $50 last_name $50 ;

last_name = scan(_infile_,-1,' ');

first_name = substr(_infile_,1,length(_infile_)-length(last_name));

cards;

Nadal Anthony Samuel

John Beth Goodrich

;

Run;

Getting values in one column

Peter_C — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:08:18 GMT

is there always just one middle name?

how often might a "last name" be more than one word (not counting double-barrelled surnames separated with a ( - ) hyphen )?

I have two middle names. Should both follow my first name?

Getting values in one column

Pritish — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:53:32 GMT

@Art and @Tom - Thanks for sharing the knowledge.

@Peter, Well it depends on the business rules and requirements. I was writing some code and came up with this and was not able to think clearly on the solution. So that's the reason I came up with this question.