How to replace a list of words with a space

[somebody]

I would like to clean company names. If the variable NAME contains INC, CORP, CLASS etc then I would like to remove them. Right now I use the following:

if find(name,' CORP ') then name_cleaned = tranwrd(name,' CORP ', ' ');

which works fine. However, if the name contains 2 words (e.g. ABC CORP CLASS A) that I want to delete, the above would only remove the word CORP and leave the word CLASS in the name. I can write another line of code such as 

if find(name,' CORP CLASS ') then name_cleaned = tranwrd(name,' CORP CLASS ', ' ');

This works fine, but if I have 20 words which I need to remove, doing so is long and might not be ideal. So what function can I use to tell SAS that if NAME contains these words, remove them or replace them with a space?

[ChrisNZ]

Regular Expressions are perfect for this type of work.

This takes care of case too:

NEWNAME=prxchange('s/CORP|CLASS|LTD|INC//i',-1,NAME);

[Shmuel]

Adapt next (updated) tested code to your needs:

%let list_to_clean = one two three four five;
%let n2c = %sysfunc(countw(&list_to_clean)); 
data _null_;
length list_to_clean $100;
     list2clean = "&list_to_clean";
     do i=1 to &n2c;
        list_to_clean = trim(list_to_clean) || ' ' || quote(trim(scan(list2clean,i)));
     end;
     call symput('List_to_Clean',trim(list_to_clean));
run;
%put XXX= &list_to_clean;

*%let list_to_clean = "one" "two" "three" "four" "five";


data have;
  length string $30;
  infile cards truncover;
  input string $30. ;
cards;
there is one tree
I have three sons
raise two fingers
Nothing to Clean
;
run;
data want;
 set have;
     array w2c {&n2c} $ (&list_to_clean);
     string1 = string;
     do i=1 to countw(string);
        w2check = scan(string,i);
        if w2check in w2c
        then string1 = tranwrd(string,strip(w2check),' ');  
     end;
     keep string string1;
run;

[ChrisNZ · Accepted solution]

Note that to find words, the findw function is better.

In this case you need to add \b in the expression:

NAME = prxchange('s/\b(CLASS|LTD|INC)\b//i',-1,NAME);

You might also want to remove double spaces.

NAME = compbl(prxchange('s/\b(CLASS|LTD|INC)\b//i',-1,NAME));

[andreas_lds]

Just one thing to add: when using tranwrd or translate it is not necessary to wrap calling those function in an if-then-statement. If those function don't find something to replace, they return the unchanged first parameter of the functions.