topic Re: replace spaces with comma in SAS Programming

replace spaces with comma

ArchanaSudhir — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 21:24:45 GMT

HI,

I am trying to replace spaces with comma for a string.

I have a string var2 with the following value:

100 20 5 55 (There are 6 spaces after 20)

Var2 has a length of 128.

I want to get it as 100,20,5,55(spaces shrinked and a coma in between.

I am trying

var2=trim(var2);

var2=compbl(var2);

var2=tranwrd(var2,"",",");

I am getting

100,20,5,55,,,,,,,

Please advise how to remove the trailing commas.

Thanks,

Archana

Re: replace spaces with comma

Haikuo — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 21:52:40 GMT

You are very close, trim() need to be implemented on the fly, otherwise, if the variable fixed length is larger then the variable contents, the rest of the length will be padded with blanks.

try this:

var2=tranwrd(trim(compbl(var2))," ",",");

Other options including PRXCHANGE, one function does it all:

var_prx=prxchange('s/\s+(?=\S+)/,/',-1 , var2);

Re: replace spaces with comma

ArchanaSudhir — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 14:31:10 GMT

That was tricky, thanks 🙂