topic Replacing all punctuation in a string with spaces in SAS Programming

Replacing all punctuation in a string with spaces

ab12nov — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:39:55 GMT

Hi,

Is there a work around that I can use just one tranwrd function to replace all the special charaters in the string. I'm using below code to replace word by word using multiple variable.

data demo;
string='run along&the$wall#mister miller';
newstring1=tranwrd(string,'#',' ');
newstring2=tranwrd(newstring1,'&',' ');
newstring3=tranwrd(newstring2,'$',' ');
run;

Thanks.

Re: Replacing all punctuation in a string with spaces

Reeza — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:41:14 GMT

Try TRANSLATE instead.

Re: Replacing all punctuation in a string with spaces

kiranv_ — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:50:59 GMT

you can use prxchange too

data demo;
string='run along&the$wall#mister miller';
string1= prxchange('s/&|\$|#/ /', -1, string);
run;

Re: Replacing all punctuation in a string with spaces

Tom — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:53:00 GMT

Combine the translate function with the compress function. Use the modifiers for the compress function to tell it which characters you DON'T want to turn into spaces.

data test;
  string='run along&the$wall#mister miller';
  new_string=translate(string,' ',compress(string,,'ad'));
  put string $char100. / new_string $char100. ;
run;

run along&the$wall#mister miller
run along the wall mister miller