topic Why the TRANSLATE FUNCTION translate incorrectly? in SAS Programming

Why the TRANSLATE FUNCTION translate incorrectly?

LinyuanQin — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 09:11:45 GMT

Hi everyone:

I've written the code as below and I expected the result in log was '123456789101112;223456789101112' but what I get is '323;223'. Would anyone tell me why the TANSLATE did not work as is described and how to approach what I want? Appreciate any help!

The code:

data _null_;

length tran $50.;

tran=translate('yhp;qly','123456789101112','yhp','223456789101112','qly');

put tran;

run;

Qinly

Re: Why the TRANSLATE FUNCTION translate incorrectly?

RW9 — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 09:27:42 GMT

Hi,

Check out the help documentation for the function: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000215153.htm

Firstly the details section explains why the length is not as expected - it sets the new variable to be as long as the first parameter you pass in, so yhp;qly = length 7, output length is going to be 7, not all those other characters.

Also, you may want to split that statement up:

data tmp;

length tran $50.;

tran=translate('yhp;qly','123456789101112','yhp');
tran=translate(tran,'223456789101112','qly');
put tran;

run;

Or, use the tranwrd function just to replace things.

Re: Why the TRANSLATE FUNCTION translate incorrectly?

Tom — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:37:23 GMT

Looks like it is doing what you asked. TRANSLATE works on characters, not strings.

You told it to take the string

'yhp;qly'

And make these letter transformations:

y -> 1

h -> 2

p -> 3

q -> 2

l -> 2

y -> 3

Note that have two different targets for the letter y so the last one won and you ended up with:

'323;223'

Perhaps you wanted to use TRANWRD() or TRANSTRN() function instead?