topic Re: multiple delimiter reading scan function?? in SAS Programming

multiple delimiter reading scan function??

buddha_d — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 16:55:58 GMT

SAS group,

could you please help me get this from string name (3 spaces as delimiters, between name and city). I want to extract name.

Any thoughts please. I have sas eg and it is not taking scan function (quotation marks has 3 spaces in between). It worked in SAS 9.3, but not in sas eg.

example: name1=scan(name,1," ");

have file

name city state zipcode

wal mart siouxcity ia 14525

arthur chiropracter nd richmond ca 25684

want file

wal mart

arthur chiropracter nd

Thanks in advance.

Re: multiple delimiter reading scan function??

ballardw — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 17:09:24 GMT

Are you reading an external file? If you actually have 3 characters between each field you could use the dlmstr=' ' option instead of dlm

However the data you show has only two spaces between the state and the zipcode so perhaps dlmstr=' ' (two spaces) will actually work to read the file.

Re: multiple delimiter reading scan function??

Astounding — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 17:18:13 GMT

This is mildly clumsy, but it should work when you are searching for the beginning of the incoming string:

name1 = substr(name, 1, index(name, ' ') ) ;

Re: multiple delimiter reading scan function??

buddha_d — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 17:29:53 GMT

This works thanks Astounding