topic Re: Delete the last words of a sentence in SAS Programming

Delete the last words of a sentence

Garik — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 12:35:04 GMT

Hello.

I have a problem on deleting the last words of a sentense.

So, here is the details of the problem:

the column contains models of phones with colors, I must eliminate the colors and needless details from it, there are cases when the models contain two type of colors or details, for instance

Alcatel One Touch POP C7 Bluish Black

iPhone 6 S 32 GB Full Gold

I want to delete the last two "words" if they are colors or details. how to do it?

thank you a lot.

Re: Delete the last words of a sentence

Garik — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 12:44:53 GMT

Alcatel One Touch Idol 2 Mini S Slate White
Alcatel One Touch POP C5 Dark Grey
Alcatel One Touch POP C5 Pure White
Alcatel One Touch POP C7 Bluish Black
Alcatel One Touch POP C7 Full White

Re: Delete the last words of a sentence

RW9 — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 12:49:55 GMT

And what is the logic for know that either the last, or last two words are to do with color? "Full" for instance has nothing logically to do with color. I would suggest you build a list of strings, or combination of possibles, and use that to remove information from the string, e.g.:

data colors;
  color="SLATE WHITE"; output;
  color="DARK GREY"; output;
  color="GREY"; output;
...
run;
proc sql;
  create table WANT as 
  select  tranwrd(A.STRING,B.COLOR) as STRING
  from    HAVE A
  left join COLORS
  on      index(A.STRING,B.COLOR) > 0;
quit;

Re: Delete the last words of a sentence

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 12:52:12 GMT

data want;
set have;
newstring = string; /* to get the same length */
newstring = ' ';
do i = 1 to countw(string) - 2;
  newstring = catx(' ',newstring,scan(string,i));
end;
drop string;
rename newstring=string;
run;

Re: Delete the last words of a sentence

Garik — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 12:53:23 GMT

thanks for replay;

But, could you write the same code for sas, I am not familiar with sql.

Re: Delete the last words of a sentence

Garik — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 13:03:33 GMT

can I use an array if I must check if the last two words are needless words? Suppose I have the list of the "words" that must be deleted from the string.

Re: Delete the last words of a sentence

RW9 — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 13:08:59 GMT

Not without a lot of code. You will see the join is on the value of one being within the string of the other (the index()). This is difficult to do in base SAS. Its really worth learning SQL, its relatively simple and very powerful on joins.