Drop alpha portion of alphanumeric variable

[deleted_user]

What is the most efficient way to drop the alpha portion of a large dataset of alphanumeric variables and then store the numeric portion as text? Examples of the existing data:0000000001M
0000003840M
0000003841M
0000003850M
0009321993M
0015270457M
0015318819M
0015326549M
0015329899M
0015332091M
0015332554M
0015334238M

I want to drop the "M" (although the alpha characters are not always M) and keep the remainder of the string with all leading 0.

Thanks,

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:
Check out the COMPRESS function examples. There are some arguments that you can add to the function call to suppress out either alpha characters or digits ('A', 'l' or 'd') are the arguments.

cynthia

[deleted_user]

Thanks! COMPRESS worked like a charm.