How to remove special characters only from first position?

[Babloo]

I've a data like below. Here I need to remove only the colon (:) in the variable 'userid' if it is a first character.

userid

:sassrv

:datapo@saspw

74064:datapo@saspw

I need the data as below.

userid

sassrv

datapo@saspw

74064:datapo@saspw

I tried with compress function to achieve this, but could not succeed. Please advise,

[LinusH]

Why didn't it work with compress?

You need to use it in conjunction with if, substr and cats.

[Babloo]

Thanks for your response.

May I request to give a code snippet as I was doing something wrong with these function.

[Ksharp · Accepted solution]

Code: Program

data have;
input userid $40.;
cards;
:sassrv
:datapo@saspw
74064:datapo@saspw
;
run;
data want;
 set have;
 new=prxchange('s/^://',1,userid);
run;

[MadhuKorni]

data log_analysis;

infile '/usr/sas/sas_config/Lev1/SASApp/Logs/SASApp_STP_2015-08-19_tmp1_19142.log' truncover;

input var : $ 3000.;

var1 = _infile_;

if var1 = :'2015';

Date_With_TimeStamp = scan(var1,1," ");

Status = scan(var1,2," ");

Processid = scan(var1,3," ");

if substr(scan(var1,4," "),1,1)=':' then userid =substr(scan(var1,4," "),2) ;

else userid = scan(var1,4," ");

Details = scan(var1,-1,'-');

drop var var1;

run;