topic remove multiple spaces between words in a string in SAS Programming

remove multiple spaces between words in a string

LRogers — Thu, 08 May 2025 18:29:03 GMT

Hello!

I have a string values in a dataset that I would like to cleanup so there's only one space between each word.

There are some cases where there's two spaces so it's creating a separate value.

Here's an example:

The first one has multiple spaces between "IT" and "INC", whereas the second one just has one space (desired).

I've researched trim, strip, compress - having trouble finding the solution.

Thanks!

P.S I'm using Enterprise Guide

Re: remove multiple spaces between words in a string

Tom — Thu, 08 May 2025 18:45:21 GMT

I doubt if Enterprise Guide has any GUI tools to handle this, so just write normal SAS code instead.

If the white spaces are actual tabs just use the COMPBL() function to collapse the multiple adjacent spaces into one.

string=compbl(string);

If you also need to remove leading spaces use LEFT() function. Don't worry about trailing spaces, SAS variables are fixed length and padded with spaces, so any trailing spaces you remove will just reappear once you store the value back into a variable.

Re: remove multiple spaces between words in a string

Quentin — Thu, 08 May 2025 18:46:01 GMT

Try the COMPBL function. From the docs:
"The COMPBL function removes multiple blanks in a character string by translating each occurrence of two or more consecutive blanks into a single blank."