Adding a period for middle initials

[sasperson1]

Hello

I am trying to add a period for a name column only when the name shows up as one letter.

data have;

middle_name;

datalines

M

Tim

Bob

I

Tina

I tried to do this:

data want;

set have;

if length(strip(middle_name)) = 1 then

middle_name = catx('.', middle_name, 1, 1), substr(middle_nm,1));

run;

but the middle initials show as M.M and I.I

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Definitely am a beginner. 

[ballardw]

Try

if length(strip(middle_name)) = 1 then

middle_name = cats( middle_name,'.');

CATX only places the character BETWEEN things. The CATS will append the period (or other string) and you have already checked that you only want to do that when there is only one character

[sasperson1]

Oh thank you! That worked for the most part. I forgot to add that some values will be blank and when I ran this, it added the period to blank values. Is there a way to avoid that? Does that make sense?

M

Tim
Bob

I
Tina

Thanks for your help!

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

if length(strip(middle_name)) = 1 and not missing(middle_name) then

middle_name = cats( middle_name,'.');

[sasperson1]

Thank you so much! That worked.

Cheers!