How to Compress Certain String ( Additional char to create white space) i

[SASuserlot]

I have a dataset that will be sent to ods rtf output. I want to compare the dataset with mine, Some variables have characters that are used to create white space or 'ESC" for reporting.  I am not sure how to remove them. I tried to compress and translate functions to manipulate. but I am having difficulty removing them."(*ESC*)R'\par '" is the extra string that I want to remove. When I used to compress it removing breakers (parenthesis) for others. How I can achieve this? Thank you for your suggestions. Also what exactly does this String  (*ESC*)R'\par ') do?

data chk;
have = "55 (43.8%)(*ESC*)R'\par '92";
want = "55(43.8%)92";
run;

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

One way:

data chk;
have = "55 (43.8%)(*ESC*)R'\par '92";
want = compress(tranwrd(have,"(*ESC*)R'\par '",''));
run;

The Tranwrd function replaces a whole matching string with another, in this case empty string (space) and Compress removes the spaces. TRANSLATE does a character by character replacement and would not be desired because if you replace the ( or the ) then the parentheses around the percentage also get replaced (I guess you found that out).

That \par would be RAW RTF codes, likely involving a paragraph (this is a guess, do a google search for "RTF Codes" for details) somewhere. The "*ESC*" part places an escape to allow the SAS ODS generator to send a raw rtf formatting code to a word processor that can handle them.

[SASuserlot]

It worked. Thank you very much.