topic Scan function with space as delimiter in SAS Programming

Scan function with space as delimiter

GN0001 — Mon, 08 May 2023 19:06:47 GMT

Hello team,

Would you please let me know what these two scan function do with space as a delimiter?

FirstName = Scan(MemberName, 1, " ");

LastName = Scan(MemberLast, 2, " ");

Regards,

Blue

Re: Scan function with space as delimiter

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 08 May 2023 19:48:59 GMT

Maxim 1: Read the Documentation: SCAN Function

and Maxim 4: Do a Test Run. Feed some strings to these function calls and see what happens.

Re: Scan function with space as delimiter

ballardw — Mon, 08 May 2023 21:32:59 GMT

Without example values for Membername or Memberlast which should I guess.

"result" can be interesting depending on other characters in the variable and which position.

Give me actual values I can tell you. But I'm not going to guess because there are way too many possible results from missing to equal to the variable depending on the actual values that it isn't worth trying to list all of them.

Plus depending on the character encoding you might actually need Kscan.

Re: Scan function with space as delimiter

Tom — Tue, 09 May 2023 03:15:24 GMT

The two assignment statements are both asking SAS to parse the value of the variable pass to them into "words" based on considering blanks as the delimiter between the words.

The first one is taking the first word it finds.

The second one is taking the second word it finds.

Also the two assignment statements are taking the words from two DIFFERENT variables.

The first one is reading from the variable MEMBERNAME and the second one is reading from the variable MEMBERLAST.