Transwrd matching everything

[Shone]

Hi I have a  macro variable called list when I used tranwrd it matches everything
%let list=apple ball cats bapplee;
%let i=1 ;

%let dependent=%scan(&list,&i," ");/* list of dependent variable*/
%let independent = %sysfunc(tranwrd(&list, &dependent.,%str()));

%put &dependent;
%put &independent;

Result I am getting is ball cats b e 

Result I want is ball cats bapplee

How can I get the expected result? 

Thank you, 

Shone

[AMSAS]

Hi,

From the documentation:

The Basics

The TRANWRD function copies the value in source to the result string while searching for all non-overlapping substrings in source that are equal to the value in target. Each of these substrings is omitted from the result and the value of replacement is copied in its place. The TRANWRD function does not remove trailing blanks in the target string or the replacement string.

A good place to start is to first remove complexity by removing all the macro references e.g. 

data _null_ ;
	x=tranwrd("apple ball cats bapplee","apple","xxx") ;
	put x= ;
run ;

When you run this then you can understand what TRANWRD is doing:

149  data _null_ ;
150      x=tranwrd("apple ball cats bapplee","apple","xxx") ;
151      put x= ;
152  run ;

x=xxx ball cats bxxxe
NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):
      real time           0.00 seconds
      cpu time            0.00 seconds

As you can see every occurrence of "apple" is replaced by "xxx" which is why "bapplee" is transformed to bxxxe

So how do you get the result you are looking for, well that's where it gets a little tricky as I can't be sure of your data, but one option could be to add a space after the target:

218  data _null_ ;
219      x=tranwrd("apple ball cats bapplee","apple "," ") ;
220      put x= ;
221  run ;

x=ball cats bapplee
NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):
      real time           0.00 seconds
      cpu time            0.00 seconds

But that would depend on your data and what you want to achieve 

I hope this helps