topic Find the first occurrence of character in a string. in SAS Programming

Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

GN0001 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 20:45:09 GMT

Hello team,

I have a string as this: 1234568F888.

I need to find the position of the character in this string.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Blue

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 20:48:50 GMT

NOTDIGIT Function

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

HarrySnart — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 20:54:05 GMT

hi @GN0001

I'd use prxmatch to get the index.

example below

data _null_;
have = "1234568F888";
want = prxmatch('([A-Za-z])',have);
put want;
run;

thanks

harry

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

PaigeMiller — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 21:13:31 GMT

The ANYALPHA function would also work here

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

GN0001 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:01:35 GMT

Hello,

I tried to use anyalpha, but I couldn't.

Can you please kindly guide me?

Regards,

blue

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

GN0001 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:06:38 GMT

Hello Harry,

This didn't work. it gave me 17.

Thanks for your input anyway.

Respectfully,

Blue

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

GN0001 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:10:19 GMT

I used Anyalpha, that gave me number 17.
I need to use this in a substr function, to get all the string till 17 or till whatever number Anyalpha gives.
Regards,
blue

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

HarrySnart — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:15:42 GMT

Hi Blue

That's odd it gave you 17. I've just re-ran it in my environment, it gives me the correct position at 8.

Is it giving you 17 when you apply it to your real dataset?

Thanks

Harry

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

HarrySnart — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:24:21 GMT

Hi @GN0001 ,

if you're getting 17 with both PRXPARSE and ANYALPHA then it sounds like you just need to do the substring from this?

You can feed the output of either approach into the SUBSTR function.

data _null_;
have = "1234568F888";
want = prxmatch('([A-Za-z])',have);
put "character at: " want;
/* substring until char */
want2 = substr(have,1,want-1); *everything until F;
want3 = substr(have,want+1); *everything after F;
put want2;
put want3;
run;

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

PaigeMiller — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:50:29 GMT

@GN0001 wrote:

Hello,

I tried to use anyalpha, but I couldn't.

Can you please kindly guide me?

Regards,

blue

We have talked about this. Do not say it doesn't work without giving more information — specifically we need you to provide the code you tried, the input data (if it is not in the code itself) and the output. And we shouldn't have to ask for this in every thread.

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

Tom — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 23:16:01 GMT

So are you using a double byte character set? That might return 17 instead of 9 since each character would take 2 bytes in the string the 9 character would start in the 17th byte.

Or perhaps your string has leading spaces that you are not seeing either because you use PUT with the $ format instead of the $CHAR or $QUOTE format. Or you looked that the ODS output instead of the LISTING (PRINT) output.

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

GN0001 — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 05:45:39 GMT

Yes correct, it gave me number 17 on my own data.
I used it in in substr,
Thanks for it,
Respectfully,
Blue blue

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

GN0001 — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 05:55:18 GMT

I acknowledged it, but input data was member Id. If I share it, I can be jailed. My input data is personal health information, I can’t share it. I have mentioned it several times.
I always Google before posting my question to this forum if I can’t find the answer, or if I find the answer, again I want to make sure that what I am trying to do is 100 percent correct.
Please kindly bear with me.
Regards
Blue

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 06:03:38 GMT

For the data you presented, the suggested methods work, period.

Applying those methods to your real data is now your task. Different data, different results.

If you need further help, supply usable example data (DATA step with DATALINES) where you make up fake data which resembles the original data structure, and show the expected result from this fake data.

Re: Find the first occurrence of character in a string.

Patrick — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:41:00 GMT

If you're really dealing with a multibyte character set then you need to tell us clearly. For a multibyte character set one can only use string functions on I18N Level 2.

Which functions are suitable is fully documented here.

From what you write I believe you want the substring of digits up-to the first character in the string. If so then why not use the scan() function ...or kscanx() for multibyte.

data test;
  infile datalines truncover;
  input str $20.;
  first_char_pos=kfindc(str,,'kd');
  digits_until_first_char=kscanx(str,1,'','kd');
  datalines;
1234568F888
;
proc print data=test;
run;