1st occurance of space to be removed (Space removal from string)

[sahoositaram555]

Hi Experts,

I have a column such like below:

9  years
1  Week
0 6 year
1 0 Months

1  YEAR 7 MONTHS
5  YEARS
1  YEAR 6 MONTHS

I've some places double or single blanks in the ist space. I would like to remove the ist occuring space(if there are 2 spaces, 1 space to nospace. How to do achieve this? one such example could be:  1 0 years should be  10 years.

[Jagadishkatam]

You can use compbl function which will compress the double blanks to single blanks


compbl(var)

[ChrisNZ]

This will always remove the first space:

data WANT; 
  set HAVE;
  STR1 = prxchange('s/ //',1,STR);
run;

STR	STR1
9  years	9 years
1  Week	1 Week
0 6 year	06 year
1 0 Months	10 Months
1  YEAR 7 MONTHS	1 YEAR 7 MONTHS
5  YEARS	5 YEARS
1 YEAR 6 MONTHS	1 YEAR 6 MONTHS