deleting repetitive text within a cell

[ilikesas]

hi,

suppose I have the following table:

Comp Name
The company ABC The company ABC The company ABC
The company DEF The company DEF The company DEF

That is, inside each cell I have a repetition, so what I would like to obtain is the deletion of the repetition so that the new table should be as following

Comp Name
The company ABC
The company DEF

Thank you!

[Reeza]

SAS doesn't really have cells. Is your data originally in Excel?

Does each variable/row contain the repetitive text or are they separate rows?

[ilikesas]

Hi Reeza,

Actually my original data is in Excel, sorry for not mentioning that, and there in Excel each row contains the repetitive text, just as I showed in my table above.

Thanks

[Reeza]

What happens when you import it?

Also, can you attach a sample file.

[ilikesas]

When I do a proc print of the imported excel file I get:

1	ALCO Stores, Inc. ALCO Stores, Inc. ALCO Stores, Inc

that is, the repetition is put into a sequence

[art297 · Accepted solution]

Daniel,

Can't say for sure without seeing your sas dataset but, if your file is called have and the variable is actually imported as comp_name, then the following might do what you want:

data want (drop=_:);

  length comp_name $40;

  set have (rename=(comp_name=_c));

  comp_name=scan(_c,1,,'c');

run;

[ilikesas]

Hi Arthur,

I did your code and it worked for my sample, here is the result:

1	ALCO Stores, Inc.

Thanks!