I have a text file that is not delimited and my name field looks like this:
JOHN DOE
MARYELIZABETH SMITH
JACKIE DOE
SOPHIE DOE
The field is $50. as name AND there are four spaces in between the firstname and the lastname
How do I parse it to give me FIRST NAME AND LAST NAME
Thank you in advance
did you try scan function?
data output;
set input;
FIRST_NAME=scan(name, 1);
LAST_NAME=scan(name,2);
run;
thanks I did try what you said and also this and both did not work
first_nm=scan(r_name,1,' '); last_nm=scan(r_name,2,' ');
Ok Good 🙂
If both first and last name are guaranteed not to have any spaces, you can just use SCAN.
If you specify 4 spaces because you want to treat single spaces as non-delimiters, then you have a few options. The easiest is to use DLMSTR as ' ', I think.
data want;
length first last $50;
infile datalines dlmstr=' ';
input
first $ last $;
;;;;
datalines;
JOHN DOE
MARY ELIZABETH SMITH
JACKIE DOE
SOPHIE DOE
;;;;
run;
But if you have other fields and want to read them as fixed width, you could read into NAME, then FIND ' ' and then use SUBSTR to parse it, or a perl regular expression.
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