Invalid ASCII character in name.

[msharma1788]

Requirement is to replace invalid character with valid character.

In case a dataset has the below values.

FIELD	FLDVALUE
FNAME	José
LNAME	Colón
LNAME	Colón
LNAME	Burgos-Suárez
LNAME	Nogueras-López
LNAME	Camacho-De León
LNAME	Padilla-Rodríguez
LNAME	Vilaró
MID	C>
LNAME	Vázquez-Hernández
LNAME	Montaño
LNAME	Camacho-De León
FNAME	Michaéla

We need the value as José = Jose

                                    Burgos-Suárez= Burgos-Suarez                

This data id pulled from EFT File and we need to reformat this data.

Please suggest.

[RW9]

Use National Language support, change SAS session to UTF-8 encoding.  Do a tranwrd() stastement for each character to change e.g.

want=tranwrd(have,"é","e");

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

You do not tell us all characters are "invalid".

Likely you are looking for the TRANSLATE function which you provide a search string and a replacement string. Every character in the search string would be replaced by the corresponding character in the replacement string.

Suppose I want to replace > with a space and ! with and L in a variable then

str = translate(str,' L','>!');

note that the replacement list comes first and the search list of characters second. The number of characters in the replacement and search lists must match. if you want to replace every value in the search list with a blank then you need one blank for each character such as

str = translate(str,' ','!@#$%^&*()');

you would also need to ensure that you have the matching cases such as

str = translate(str,'aenN','áéñÑ');

[msharma1788]

Thanks! this really helps 🙂

[Ksharp]

data have;
 want=basechar('José');
 put want=;
run;