topic Re: Replacing words in a variable in SAS Programming

Replacing words in a variable

frupaul — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 19:04:34 GMT

Hi Everyone,

I have the following data set:

Code used to create above data set is:

data Questions;
length Question $100 Name $20;
infile datalines dlm=',';
input Question $ Name $ ;
cards;
When was your last interaction with Pablo Matinee,Pablo Matinee
When was your last interaction with Lucien Koku,Lucien Koku
;

I want to replace every occurrence of the customer Name in the Question with [Name]. So what i intend to achieve is this:

What i have written so far is:

data New;
set Questions;
tranwrd(Question,Name,"%str(%[)Name%str(%])");
run;

but this has not worked. Please can anyone suggest a solution?

Thanks,

Re: Replacing words in a variable

svh — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 19:19:12 GMT

You may want to try the TRANSTRN() function, for it lets you remove part of string and not leave a blank behind:

 new_var = transtrn(Question, Name, "[Name]");

Re: Replacing words in a variable

pau13rown — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 19:21:03 GMT

a=index(question, '[');

newvar=substr(question,1,a-1)||put(name,$50.);

Re: Replacing words in a variable

PGStats — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 19:21:37 GMT

Use macros in last resort. They are not needed here.

data New;
set Questions;
length newQuestion $100;
newQuestion  = tranwrd(Question, trim(name), "[Name]");
run;

Re: Replacing words in a variable

Reeza — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 19:24:21 GMT

TRANWRD is for a word but you have two words so it's not going to match. Is it possible to have multiple iterations of a persons name in the text? And is it guaranteed that the name is always at the end?

You do want a TRANSLATE/TRANS family of functions for sure though. If you have multiple occurrences it could be problematic though.

@frupaul wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I have the following data set:

Code used to create above data set is:

data Questions;
length Question $100 Name $20;
infile datalines dlm=',';
input Question $ Name $ ;
cards;
When was your last interaction with Pablo Matinee,Pablo Matinee
When was your last interaction with Lucien Koku,Lucien Koku
;

I want to replace every occurrence of the customer Name in the Question with [Name]. So what i intend to achieve is this:

What i have written so far is:

data New;
set Questions;
tranwrd(Question,Name,"%str(%[)Name%str(%])");
run;

but this has not worked. Please can anyone suggest a solution?

Thanks,