topic Re: How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place in SAS Programming

How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place

daszlosek — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 17:00:40 GMT

Hello all,

I am trying to pull a string out from a free text. I was able to use the substring and find function to pull out the specific area around the string. but there are periods marking the end of a sentence that I would like to remove. Not all rows have a period at the end (my assumption would be I could use compress, but then any decimals would be removed as well.

For example:

11.5

10.

10.2.

And I would like:

11.5

10.2

I was thinking maybe I could use the find function to find the second period and then delete? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

EDIT: My apologies, I forgot to remove the string

Re: How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place

Reeza — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 16:57:00 GMT

There's no difference in your Have/Want

Re: How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place

kiranv_ — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 16:57:32 GMT

your example and what you want are same. so you want dot removed at the end of string?

Re: How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place

RW9 — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 17:00:27 GMT

I agree with the other posters, your test data is wrong. One solution:

data want;
  set have;
  if char(thestring,lengthn(thestring)-1)="." then thestring=substr(thestring,1,lengthn(thestring)-1);
run;

As you haven't provided test data in the form of a datastep I have made up a variable thestring.

Re: How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place

kiranv_ — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 17:20:34 GMT

Another way

data abc;
input a $;
b=prxchange('s/^(.+?)(\.)*$/$1/', -1,trim(a));
datalines;
10.2
10.2.
10
10.3...
run;

Re: How to remove periods from a string with digits in decimal place

Ksharp — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 13:54:06 GMT

data abc;
input a $;
b=prxchange('s/\.+$//', -1,trim(a));
datalines;
10.2
10.2.
10
10.3...
run;