topic Re: Remove leading characters if they are equal to something specified in SAS Programming

Remove leading characters if they are equal to something specified

SasStatistics — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 12:59:22 GMT

Assume I have the following data stored in a SAS table:

Actual	Desired
US1234	1234
13	13
14567	14567
US3345	3345

What I would like to do is to check each row, if the first two letters are "US" then I would like to remove those letters. If the first two letters are not "US" I want to keep the row as it is.

Any idea on how to do this?

Re: Remove leading characters if they are equal to something specified

PaigeMiller — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 13:14:38 GMT

Try this:

if actual=:'US' then desired=substr(actual,3);
else desired=actual;

Re: Remove leading characters if they are equal to something specified

SasStatistics — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 13:19:45 GMT

compress(Actual, 'US')

Re: Remove leading characters if they are equal to something specified

PaigeMiller — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 14:52:42 GMT

Maybe COMPRESS works with your data as well as the solution I provided, but COMPRESS will do things to your data that you didn't ask for, such as remove US from anywhere in the string (you didn't ask for that, you asked only for beginning of the string) and it will remove U from anywhere and it will remove S from anywhere. Again, this may work fine on your data, but I point this out for anyone else reading along who may have different data.