topic Re: Change length of variable in SAS Programming

Change length of variable

Sharukhmk — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:02:27 GMT

Hi All,

i am reading the varaible and then using that in like statment, while doing this during comparision gwtting wrong output because of space(variable length), coul you please help.

data filesystemtable ;
infile "/home/cfile/filesystem.txt" ;
input filesystem :$30. ;
call symput('filesystem',filesystem);
run;

data Library_of_filesystem;
set mine;
where path like "&filesystem%";
keep path Library_name libref;
run;

log:
NOTE: There were 0 observations read from the data set WORK.MINE.
WHERE path like '/sas/bau/pricing/ %';

you can see as variable length is less than 30 hence space getting addedd while comparing and not getting expected result, could you please help to remove the leading space?

Re: Change length of variable

ChrisPillsbury — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:39:56 GMT

Sharukhmk,

have you tried a simple solution? Try stripping the variable before assigning it.

variable = strip(variable);

Chirs

Re: Change length of variable

ballardw — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:42:27 GMT

Not really clear what the problem is as we really don't know any of your data.

I would guess that you may want

call symput('filesystem', STRIP(filesystem));

Re: Change length of variable

Sharukhmk — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:50:14 GMT

strip, trim and compress tried but still same thing.

Re: Change length of variable

ChrisPillsbury — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:56:43 GMT

What exactly are you trying to achieve with that code?

Re: Change length of variable

Sharukhmk — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:58:15 GMT

data is : /sas/bau/pricing and issue is when i am reading it as $30. when comparing(using like) there is space coming ("/sas/bau/pricing ")which is not giving excpected result

Re: Change length of variable

Sharukhmk — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:18:04 GMT

reading data and using that in where statement so i can filter out a table
.

Re: Change length of variable

ChrisPillsbury — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:30:23 GMT

Seems like dataset "mine" is the issue, SAS is looking for a specific table. Maybe using _null_ will help? try this....

data Library_of_filesystem;

set _null_;

where path like "&filesystem%";

keep path Library_name libref;

run;

Re: Change length of variable

Sharukhmk — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:33:38 GMT

Mine table contains data and one of variable is path with which I am
comparing /sas/bau/pricing.

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Re: Change length of variable

ballardw — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:40:42 GMT

1) Try Call SymputX

2) what is the value of filesystem in the LAST record in the data set

3) you may need to examine that filesytem variable to see if it actually has NULL character(s) at the end and not a BLANK at the end. STRIP does not remove null characters.

Re: Change length of variable

Sharukhmk — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 10:43:34 GMT

the value of filesystem is /sas/bau/pricing
how can i test for blanks

Re: Change length of variable

ballardw — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 23:28:30 GMT

One way is use the Index function which returns the first position in the variable with a specified character.

data example;
   x='ThisHasNoBlanks';
   y='ThisHas A Blank'; /*blank being the SPACE character*/
   z='ThisHas Null'; /* Null character entered by typing 255 
                       on the NUMERIC key pad while holding the ALT key*/
   XhasBlank = index(x,' ');
   YhasBlank = index(y,' ');
   ZhasBlank = index(z,' '); /* space*/
   ZhasNull  = index(z,' '); /*ALT+255*/
run;