topic Re: How do I remove quotation marks from character strings? in SAS Procedures

How do I remove quotation marks from character strings?

FatCaptain — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:34:23 GMT

Hi,

I thought that this would be a fairly basic problem but I'm struggling for an answer.

I'm trying to remove single and double quote marks from a character variable.

The two statements I'm using to try do this are COMPRESS and TRANWRD. Both of these however, require you to put the character you want to remove inside quotation marks e.g.

COMPRESS(character-variable,''') ;
TRANWRD(character-variable,''','') ;

This obvously causes problems as the quotation mark I want to remove closes the second part of each statement.

Is there any way to get around this or another way of doing it?

Cheers,

Fat Captain.

Re: How do I remove quotation marks from character strings?

data_null__ — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:57:27 GMT

Inside use two. See example.

[pre]
"""'"
or

'''"'

[/pre]

Re: How do I remove quotation marks from character strings?

FatCaptain — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:45:57 GMT

Cheers,

Thanks for this.

Re: How do I remove quotation marks from character strings?

paulkaefer — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 20:07:20 GMT

Another solution is the DEQUOTE function. Call dequote(variable) if the first character is a single or double quote character. It will also remove any text after the closing/right quote(s). [ref]

I know this is an older post, but it was one of the first results when searching this, so I figured including this solution here would be a good idea.

Re: How do I remove quotation marks from character strings?

GenDemo — Mon, 21 May 2018 05:11:28 GMT

I ended up using word = compress(word,"""'");
as it said the call dequote function could not be found, and similairly if I use word = dequote(word); then it removed leading quotes, but not closing quotes.