topic Re: How to Extract Part of a String Before a Delimiter in SAS Visual Analytics

How to Extract Part of a String Before a Delimiter

ngunan0921 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:17:42 GMT

Hi there!

I'm asked to do the following below in SAS Visual Analytics. I'm using SAS Viya for Learners 3.5.

This is what I have so far. it looks good in the beginning but once I reach the later parts of the data, the string I want isn't correctly extracted. I need assistance on how to extract part of a string before a delimiter. In this case, before the colon.

Thanks in advance.

Re: How to Extract Part of a String Before a Delimiter

Stu_SAS — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 11:44:38 GMT

You are very close! This looks like a learning exercise so I won't give the answer away entirely, but I'll give you a hint. Consider that the length of the substring before : varies in length:

10-5:23.6,-51.2
10-100:23.6,-51.2

If you could find the position of the :, then you would know exactly how long your substring needs to be:

10-5:23.6,-51.2
    ^
    5

10-100:23.6,-51.2
      ^
      7

Is there another function that can help you do this?

Re: How to Extract Part of a String Before a Delimiter

ngunan0921 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:18:05 GMT

It took me some time to figure it out. I thought it was the getlength at first but I realized it's the findchar.

thanks for the hint!

Re: How to Extract Part of a String Before a Delimiter

Stu_SAS — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 16:34:31 GMT

Bingo! Awesome work 😃

Substring('from_loc'n, 1, FindChar('from_loc'n, ':')-1)