topic Re: substring from the right in SAS Procedures

substring from the right

podarum — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 18:45:03 GMT

Hi, is there a quick way to substring from the right but skip a few digits.

If I have 2345001 I want to get 2345 .. I want to only remove the last 3 digits... the length of the field is not uniform, soucl be 8 digits or 10 or 9, etc. but th eonly thing sore sure is that I want to remove the last 3 digits.. Thanks

Re: substring from the right

PGStats — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 18:51:24 GMT

myStr = substr(myStr, 1, length(myStr) - 3);

Re: substring from the right

monei011 — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 21:31:29 GMT

Another approach in these sorts of situations is to use the substring function with the reverse function

mystr = reverse(substr(strip(reverse(mystr)),4));

Re: substring from the right

Tom — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 23:30:26 GMT

Is your variable a number or a character string?

137 data _null_;

138 x=2345001 ;

139 y=int(x/1000);

140 put x= y=;

141 run;

x=2345001 y=2345

Re: substring from the right

Haikuo — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 23:32:58 GMT

The more, the merrier:

data _null_;

mystr="2345001";

new_str=prxchange('s/(^\w+)(\w{3}$)/$1/',-1,strip(mystr));

put mystr= new_str=;

run;

Haikuo

Re: substring from the right

PGStats — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 02:22:56 GMT

The simpler, the better :smileysilly:

data _null_;

mystr=" 2345001 ";

new_str = prxchange('s/\d{3}\s*$//', 1, mystr);

put mystr= new_str=;

run;

Re: substring from the right

Haikuo — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 02:27:01 GMT

Better indeed!

Haikuo

Re: substring from the right

monei011 — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 02:36:05 GMT

Might be better use of prxchange, but not exactly readable nor intuitively obvious what the code is doing.

I'd want a comment explaining what was being done and why so that my BAU support junior could understand what the code was doing.

Re: substring from the right

PGStats — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 03:05:29 GMT

It reads: Replace (s) a succession of exactly 3 ({3}) digits (\d) followed by any amount (*) of white space (\s) and occuring at the end of the string ($) with nothing(//). Do this only once.