topic Replacing variable values with values with a space in SAS Programming

Replacing variable values with values with a space

abak — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 18:51:38 GMT

I need to merge two data sets, but one of them has one thing labelled two ways: "Place A" and "Place_A". I want to keep it as "Place A" Because I am plotting this data later on and the _ is not a beautiful thing.

Then, I need to merge the data sets based on place, but that is not the issue here, I am trying to replace "Place_A" with "Place A" in one data set so when I merge, they are recognized as the same variable. Code:

data test2;

set test;

if PLACE = Place_A then PLACE = 'Place A'n;

run;

Error: "Place A is not a valid SAS name".

This is in SAS 9.2 Unix.

Re: Replacing variable values with values with a space

novinosrin — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 18:57:31 GMT

Take a look at

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000279245.htm

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrcon/62955/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000998953.htm#a000998933

Re: Replacing variable values with values with a space

Shmuel — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 19:12:35 GMT

I assume you have a variable named PLACE in your input and you want to replace '_' with ' ' then

either do:

place = translate(place,' ','_'); /* arguments: variable name, replacement, to be replaced */

or correct your code using literals to distinguish from variables:

if place = 'Place_A'  then place = 'Place A';

in this case you can use either single quotes or double quotes.

Re: Replacing variable values with values with a space

abak — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 19:16:09 GMT

Thank you, I added VALIDVARNAME = ANY in the data statement and it told me that it created a data set with 0 observations.

data test VALIDVARNAME = ANY;

set test2;

if PLACE = Place_A then PLACE = 'Place A'n;

run;

or:

data test;

set test2;

VALIDVARNAME = ANY

if PLACE = Place_A then PLACE = 'Place A'n;

run;

Re: Replacing variable values with values with a space

abak — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 19:18:17 GMT

Just to clarify, I have a variable named PLACE and it has some of its values named Place_A that I want to change to Place A

Re: Replacing variable values with values with a space

Shmuel — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 19:23:39 GMT

You are mixing variable name with variable value.

Is 'Place_A' a variable name ? If YES maybe you want to add

LABEL Place_A = 'Place A';

then define you prefer use lables in the chart/report instead variable names.

Otherwise - see my previous post.