topic Re: How to extract first letters and numbers from a character variables in SAS Procedures

How to extract first letters and numbers from a character variables

lalohg — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 18:58:30 GMT

Hi there,

I have a character variable with letters numbers and hyphen sign and would like to extract the letters and the first two digits before the FIRST hyphen sign and create a new variable identifying these people, here is an example

Variable ID looks like:

0165218-09
0165218-09
0165218-09
13-06-0290
SP131536-01
SP131536-01
0142135-02
0142135-02
0142135-02

The new variable will look like

all your help will be appreciated

Thank you

Re: How to extract first letters and numbers from a character variables

ballardw — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 19:11:20 GMT

Do you have any that start with one letter: S12345-67? Or one numeral then the hyphen: 1-234-456? If so how are these processed?

Re: How to extract first letters and numbers from a character variables

Steelers_In_DC — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 19:14:35 GMT

The first two characters will be:

new_var = substr(variable,1,2)

I'm not sure what you are getting at with the hyphen. If the hyphen is important for another reason you might have to use something in addition to this like scan().

Re: How to extract first letters and numbers from a character variables

lalohg — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 16:51:08 GMT

Thanks for your answers

ballardw: no, I don't have IDs starting with only one letter or one numeral

The IDs starting with SP indicate a type of affiliation (thanks Mark! I can identified these people now creating the new_var), those with two digits and then the hyphen have a different affiliation as those starting with numbers but with hyphen at the end like -01, -02 etc, but I still need to separate these latter two groups

Thanks again for your help