pulling a two-word street name out of an address

[taylormccormick]

I'm trying to create a function that pulls the street name (whether one or two or three words) out of an address...to get it to pull in anything following the street number...and i'm stuck...

DATA work.practice;

Address = '44 Bird Street';

StreetName = SUBSTR(SCAN(ADDRESS,2), ANYSPACE(ADDRESS)));

RUN;

This doesn't work at all...don't know where to go with it.  Thanks!

[andreas_lds]

Have you checked what "SCAN(ADDRESS,2)" returns?

Spoiler

it returns only "Bird"

Try something like

length StreetName $ 50;
StreetName = substr(Address, anyalpha(Address));

[ballardw]

If you have many addresses I promise that no single code will work for all of them.

One of my datasets I was supposed to geocode had an "address" field that users entered information other than the address because that appeared at the top of screens or print outs. So I had to clean out stuff like:

Address= "See the woman in the back apartment  4433 Some actual Street".

Or rural addresses like "Intersection Baseline Road and County Rd 33".

Good luck and have fun.

[s_lassen]

One possibility is to use Pearl regular expressions. E.g.:

data test;
  Address = '44 Bird Street';
  PrxID=PrxParse('/\d+\s+(.*)/');
  if PrxMatch(PrxID,Address) then
    StreetName=PrxPosN(PrxID,1,Address);
run;

This function just finds one or more digits ("\d+"), followed by one or more blanks ("\s+"), and puts the rest of the string into a capture buffer ("(.*)"), the contents of which is returned by the PrxPosN function.

You will probably find that more sophistication is needed (which is why I suggest that you get into PRX functions), but this is a start.