topic remove special character from a specific variable in SAS Programming

remove special character from a specific variable

soumri — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 12:52:58 GMT

Hi everyone,
Is anyone can help me to remove a special character from a variable regardless of its order in the variable.
here is the example:
what I have:
id Mesure
10/5201 0.012
10/6522 0.452
306/312 1.003
AC115/9 0.855

what I want (just delete the slash)
id Mesure
105201 0.012
106522 0.452
306312 1.003
AC1159 0.855

My database contains more than a million ids that contain special characters (/, -,*,.) that I just want to search for and remove them by keeping the other characters.
Thank you for your help.

Re: remove special character from a specific variable

PaigeMiller — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:13:59 GMT

Use the COMPRESS function

http://documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=pgmmvacdc&cdcVersion=9.4&docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=n0fcshr0ir3h73n1b845c4aq58hz.htm&locale=en

Re: remove special character from a specific variable

soumri — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:31:09 GMT

As I understand I have to put this code:

data want;set have;

id=compress(id, '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'k');

run;

is this true?

Re: remove special character from a specific variable

RW9 — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:46:35 GMT

No. Read the documentation, all you need is:

id=compress(id, '/');

Re: remove special character from a specific variable

soumri — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:11:37 GMT

Yes, it works well. tank you.