topic Re: remove spaces from Column name in SAS Programming

remove spaces from Column name

buckeyefisher — Thu, 15 May 2014 14:05:58 GMT

I am using EG 4.3. I have a field heading 'Date Founded' (it has a space in between) that contains dates in the input excel sheet. I am not supposed to touch the input excel sheet.

Is there a way to access this field in SAS EG? I tried VALIDVARNAME = ANY option to ignore spaces but my data step is not recognizing the field. The program does not give error, simply ignores calculation in the data step.

Re: remove spaces from Column name

ballardw — Thu, 15 May 2014 14:08:48 GMT

How did you bring the data into SAS? Proc import if using the file column headers to provide variable names generally turn all spaces and special characters to underscores. I would expect the variable name to be Date_founded.

Re: remove spaces from Column name

buckeyefisher — Thu, 15 May 2014 14:14:34 GMT

no, it did not convert the input fields, I used proc import

proc import datafile= 'file A'

dbms=xls out=A replace;

sheet="xyz";

run;

Re: remove spaces from Column name

dsbihill — Thu, 15 May 2014 14:18:08 GMT

You can access the variable by typing it like this. This will tell sas that it is a name litteral.

'Date Founded'n

Re: remove spaces from Column name

RW9 — Thu, 15 May 2014 14:22:28 GMT

I would suspect then as you don't have getnames=yes; option, that it has been read in using default names for the columns, e.g. col1 col2 etc.