Deleting words before a trigger word

[Yughaber]

I have a sentence "Sacramento is the capital of California" and am told to delete the words before the word "capital" and keep the rest. Now, the code has to be written so that if the word "capital" moves around then everything before it will be deleted. For example, "The capital of California is Sacramento" then only "The" in this sentence will be removed, whereas in the previous sentence "Sacramento is the" would have been removed. 

Help please! Thanks 🙂 

[sbxkoenk · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I think you want the variable 'c' in the dataset 'want' :

data have;
a="Sacramento is the capital of California"; output;
a="The capital of California is Sacramento"; output;
run;

data want;
 set have;
 b=indexw(a,'capital');
 c=substr(a,b);
 d=substr(a,b+length('capital'));
run;
/* end of program */

Kind regards,

Koen

[Yughaber]

Thank you very much!!

[Yughaber]

another question regarding this, if I were to not use the index function would I be able to code it any differently?

[sbxkoenk]

You can also use the FINDW function.

I would not use the SCAN function (you cannot scan for a whole word).

Koen