Removing last word with length 1 or 2

[madhustats]

Hi,

I have a string and I want to remove last word with length one or two.

Example 1: Input: EXPERTS INTERNATIONAL RECRUITMENT S --------Output: EXPERTS INTERNATIONAL RECRUITMENT

Example 2: Input: LOOTAH BUILDING CONSTRUCTION LL -----------Output: LOOTAH BUILDING CONSTRUCTION

Please help.

[andreas_lds]

If the last word is longer than two chars it should not be removed, right?

Are words separated by blanks only?

If both assumptions are true, then i would use:

• b = findc(trim(string), ' ', 'b') to find the position of the last blank
• calculate the difference between b and the length of the string,
• if the result is smaller than 3: substr to extract anything before b

[Patrick · Accepted solution]

In below code the RegEx for want1 just removes the last term, the RegEx for want2 only removes the last term if it has 1 or 2 characters.

data sample;
  infile datalines truncover;
  input have $80.;
  length want1 want2 $80;
  want1=prxchange('s/\b\w+$//',1,strip(have));
  want2=prxchange('s/\b\w{1,2}$//',1,strip(have));
  datalines;
EXPERTS INTERNATIONAL RECRUITMENT S 
LOOTAH BUILDING CONSTRUCTION LL
LOOTAH BUILDING CONSTRUCTION LLS
;
proc print data=sample;
run;

[RW9]

You could simply scan the last word by space, and check if length is 1 or 2:

data want;
  str="abc ert werty we";
  if lengthn(scan(str,-1," ")) in (1,2) then check=1;
run;