Why not just test it?
We could make a string that has digits and letters and see what it does to them and whether it can be reversed.
1 data _null_; 2 custid1='09AZaz'; 3 string=COLLATE(1,256); 4 high4=substr(string,55); 5 custid2=translate(custid1, high4,string); 6 custid3=translate(custid2, string, high4); 7 put (custid:) (=/); 8 put (custid:) (=$hex./); 9 run; custid1=09AZaz custid2=fow—° custid3=09AZaz custid1=3039415A617A custid2=666F779097B0 custid3=3039415A617A
So it works when running on the same SAS session.
But you might have trouble if you use the translated string with a different encoding. Notice how the lowercase letters and even the uppercase Z were mapped to characters beyond the range of normal ASCII characters ('7F'x). A was mapped to '77'x which is a lowercase w, but Zaz was mapped to '9097B0'x, which in my encoding shows as a graphic line drawing character and degree symbol, but in this forum it looks like something else.
So if the transformed characters were transcoded into some different encoding they might be mapped to some other characters. So before trying to reverse the original logic you would need to first undo the effect of the transcoding.
@HeatherNewton You've asked the same question in two places. Repeating my answer given here with a few additions.
To avoid that several different characters can get translated into a single character you need to ensure that the from and to strings in the translate function contain the same number of characters - and that they are all different. Below amendment to your code does this.
data custinfo;
input cust_id $8.;
datalines;
E4349567
C4127658
C6267260
E5211402
K4729617
G6646262
;
run;
data test1;
set custinfo;
length string high4 $256;
retain string high4;
if _n_=1 then
do;
string=COLLATE(0,255);
high4=cats(substr(string,56),substr(string,1,55));
end;
cust_id_out_1=translate(cust_id, high4, string);
cust_id_out_2=translate(cust_id_out_1,string,high4);
format string $hex512. high4 $hex110. cust_id_out_1 $hex16.;
run;
proc print data=test1;
var cust_id cust_id_out_1 cust_id_out_2;
run;
Btw: If you really want to create and store a list of the first 256 characters in the collating sequence then you need to explicitly define the length for variable string as else it will default to a length of only $200 in your code.
You also need to start counting at 0 and not 1.
And... if you want to ensure consistent results for running in any SAS environment then you need also to care about the Collating Sequence and define it explicitly.
I'd also consider to create a list of characters for variable string that only contains printable characters and that certainly don't contain control characters.
Learn how use the CAT functions in SAS to join values from multiple variables into a single value.
Find more tutorials on the SAS Users YouTube channel.
-
3772 views
-
1 like
-
-
