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sasthebest
Calcite | Level 5

I have a field named Product with some fields having trailing and leading spaces. What code should I use to spot all the products with leading and trailing space out of million observations?

The spaces below are denoted as ...

Product 

Milk..  

..Banana 

Orange.. 

Pear..

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
Tom
Super User Tom
Super User

SAS stores character strings as fixed length fields so any short string is padded with spaces to the length of the field. Hence there is no such things as "trailing" spaces. To find character strings with leading spaces just test if it starts with a space.

if product =: ' ' then do;

....

end;

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3
Tom
Super User Tom
Super User

SAS stores character strings as fixed length fields so any short string is padded with spaces to the length of the field. Hence there is no such things as "trailing" spaces. To find character strings with leading spaces just test if it starts with a space.

if product =: ' ' then do;

....

end;

PGStats
Opal | Level 21

Trailing spaces are inconsequential in SAS as it only handles fixed length character strings; i.e. all character strings are padded with spaces. The number of leading spaces is given by LENGTH(Product) - STRIP(Product).

PG

PG
Haikuo
Onyx | Level 15

If what you mean "trailing" is to find how many blanks are padded, you could try:

lengthc(product)-length(product);

Haikuo

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