how to remove the first numbers from a character var, including numbers and "."

[Bal23]

2.1 Child Conditions
2.2 Teenage Conditions
 2.3 Adult Conditions
2.4 Senior Conditions

I need to modify this variable, by deleting 2.1, 2.2 etc. and keep Child conditions etc. The lengths of the words left are not same.

The desired var2 should be

Child conditions

teenage conditions

adult conditions

senior conditions

Compress can only remove ., any advice how to remove the first numbers?

Thanks.

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

Assuming you do not have spaces before the numbers in question

Variable = substr(variable,index(variable,' ')+1);

might work.

[Bal23]

Thanks

[SASJedi]

Actually, COMPRESS with the appropriate modifiers could handle this particular problem very nicely 🙂 The third argument accepts modifiers to change the behavior of COMPRESS. In this case, I'd use 'k' for KEEP (instead of the default REMOVE behavior) and add an 'a' to specify ALPHABETIC characters along with 's' to specify SPACE characters. The STRIP function gets rid of any leading spaces.

The result:

data test;

   length Original Fixed $ 30;

   infile datalines dsd;

   input Original;

   Fixed=strip(compress(original,,'kas'));

   put original=$quote. Fixed=$quote.;

datalines;

2.1 Child Conditions

2.2 Teenage Conditions

2.3 Adult Conditions

2.4 Senior Conditions

;

Result:

Obs	Original	Fixed
1	2.1 Child Conditions	Child Conditions
2	2.2 Teenage Conditions	Teenage Conditions
3	2.3 Adult Conditions	Adult Conditions
4	2.4 Senior Conditions	Senior Conditions