Extracting text from string

[Krysia24]

I have data that look like this: 

Chocolate chips (2)

Brown sugar (1)

Eggs 3 

Flour (1) 

Butter 2 

And what I want is just: 

Chocolate chips 

Brown sugar 

Eggs

Flour 

Butter 

Basically I want to retain all text prior to a digit or special character without compressing. 

Thanks!

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

SCAN lets you specify your delimiters, try using all the digits and the opening parenthesis to see if that gives you what you need.
You can also look at the modifiers for slightly simpler code, but this should works.

data have;
input string_variable : & $40.;
cards;
Chocolate chips (2)
Brown sugar (1)
Eggs 3 
Flour (1) 
Butter 2 
;;;;
run;

data want;
set have;

want = scan(string_variable, 1, "01234567890(");
run;

---

@Krysia24 wrote:

I have data that look like this: 

Chocolate chips (2)

Brown sugar (1)

Eggs 3 

Flour (1) 

Butter 2 

And what I want is just: 

Chocolate chips 

Brown sugar 

Eggs

Flour 

Butter 

Basically I want to retain all text prior to a digit or special character without compressing. 

Thanks!

---

[Krysia24]

Thank you! I was using a combination of substr and index and wasn't quite getting what I wanted. Thanks again. 

[ChrisNZ]

Another way is to COMPRESS out all the characters you don't want.