topic Re: Removing last word from string. in SAS Programming

Removing last word from string.

tropical_surfer — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 19:36:34 GMT

How can I remove the last word in a string?

Re: Removing last word from string.

paulkaefer — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 20:04:44 GMT

Good question. This was answered on StackOverflow as well as in this code example.

Essentially, you can pass -1 in to CALL SCAN to get the last word, and once you've found it, it's trivial to remove.

Re: Removing last word from string.

tropical_surfer — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 20:08:27 GMT

Thanks! Any advice on how to remove the second word from a string? I'm trying to check between two variables that excluding the 2nd word both strings are identical.

Re: Removing last word from string.

paulkaefer — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 20:11:01 GMT

Try the same steps, but using CALL SCAN with a count of 2.

Re: Removing last word from string.

tropical_surfer — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 20:16:18 GMT

That only keeps the first and 2nd word, but I want the entire string minus the 2nd word.

Re: Removing last word from string.

paulkaefer — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 20:27:43 GMT

Oh, I see. Well in the StackOverflow post,

substr(starting_word,1,pos-2);

is used to return a string that includes all but the last word.

You'll probably need this:

call scan(original_string, 2, pos, length);

to get the length and position of the second word, then

first_piece = substr(original_string, 1, pos-1)

(maybe pos-2 to remove the space between the words)

and

second_piece = substr(original_string, pos+length, lengthOfString)

(you'll have to calculate lengthOfString using the LENGTH function)

Then use a CAT function (see here for a good description of the different choices) to combine first_piece and second_piece.