topic Compressing spaces in SAS Programming

Compressing spaces

WilliamB — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 19:12:25 GMT

Hi,

I have a csv file:

01/02/2009,146,394

02/02/2009,278,791

03/02/2009,224,637

04/02/2009,275,725

05/02/2009,276,1Â 101

06/02/2009,247,1Â 103

07/02/2009,154,412

08/02/2009,192,609

09/02/2009,308,992

10/02/2009,333,1Â 287

11/02/2009,342,1Â 250

12/02/2009,375,1Â 975

13/02/2009,275,1Â 019

14/02/2009,120,487

15/02/2009,133,567

16/02/2009,210,770

I remove Â with the command 'compress', no problem.
But to remove the space, there is a problem, the command 'compress', does nothing.
Why?

My goal is not to change the csv file but to transform eg:

1Â 056 -- compress --> 1 056 --> compress --> 1056

data toto;
infile 'C:\.........................\sessionsetpagesvues.csv' dlm=',' firstobs=8 truncover;
input Index_des_jours :ddmmyy. Sessions :numx. x3 $;
x4=compress(x3,'Â ','a');
x5=compress(x4,'','s');
Pages_vues= input(x5, numx.);
run;

proc print data=toto(obs=350);run;

proc contents data=toto;run;

x5=compress(x4,'','s');

This command does not work why?

Thank you for your help.

Re: Compressing spaces

data_null__ — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 19:24:44 GMT

It's not a space '20'x it just looks like one. It is non-breaking space 'A0'x.

Re: Compressing spaces

paulkaefer — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 19:25:27 GMT

I'm not sure why that doesn't work, as that was my first answer.

Anyway, you can use Perl regular expressions like so:

data test;
    variable = "1 045";
    rid = prxparse('s/\s*//');
    call prxchange(rid, -1, variable);
    drop rid;
run;

Here are two references: [1], [2].

Re: Compressing spaces

RW9 — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 08:23:18 GMT

Just to add, the compress function has various modifiers you can apply to it which should simplfy your code:

x4=compress(x3,,'kd');

Note I put no characters in the second paramter, the 'KD' or keep decimals, does everything needed here. For example:

data a;
  abcd="1Â 101";
  def=compress(abcd,,"kd");
run;