topic Substr variable of different lengths? in SAS Procedures

Substr variable of different lengths?

Ltwo — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 03:42:01 GMT

Hi, I'm looking to create a substr of a variable that is of an uncertain length. The character variable I'm looking at in particular always starts with a number followed by a category, BUT the number and categories vary in length etc.

Sample data below.

data sample;
input var1 $;
datalines;
1a
11b
12b(i)
12b(ii)
12c(iii)
;
run;

And what I want to end up with is as below

data want;
input var1 $ number $ category $;
datalines;
1a 1 a
11b 11 b
12b(i) 12 b(i)
12b(ii) 12 b(ii)
12c(iii) 12 c(iii)
;
run;

How can I go about doing a substr here? Or is there a different SAS function I can use?

Re: Substr variable of different lengths?

bstarr — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:00:18 GMT

In this case you might have better luck with the COMPRESS function. If you're not familiar with it, I strongly urge you to read the SAS documentation on it - it's quite a powerful function, which can allow you to keep or drop certain characters or types of characters (e.g. alphabetic characters, numbers). This step below will create what you need for this sample.

data want;
set sample;
    number = compress(var1,,'dk');
    category=compress(var1,,'d');
run;

Re: Substr variable of different lengths?

Tom — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:36:41 GMT

You might try using the perl regular expression functions, if you already know them.

But it is pretty easy to do with SUBSTR() and VERIFY() functions.

data want ;
  set sample;
  length number suffix $20;
  number=substrn(var1,1,verify(trim(var1),'1234567890')-1);
  suffix=substrn(var1,lengthn(number)+1);
run;