return a value by matching a cell with column name

[r_levy]

I have a large data set with a bunch of redundant values in many columns.  each column corresponds to a variable, and repeats the same value for the other remaining variables like below;

COLUMN 1	COLUMN 2 ends in _x	COLUMN 3ends in _y	…	COLUMN 4 ends in _w
x1	1	2		3
y1	1	2		3
z1	1	2		3
w1	1	2		3
x2	5	1		4
y2	5	1		4
z2	5	1		4
w2	5	1		4
a2	5	1		4

x,y,z,w,a, etc. are the variables.
where x1,y1,z1,w1 are part data for customer 1 and x1,y2,z2,w2,a2 are data of customer 2.

column 1 is the value for variable x, and it's value repeats for the rest of the variables for that customer.

How can I aggregate these into one column for each variable for the customer like below;

COLUMN 1	AGGREGATE COLUMN
x1	1
y1	2
z1	…
w1	3
x2	5
y2	1
z2	…
w2	…
a2	4

I'm not sure how to tell SAS to serach the column name for the variable, and return just that value.

[SuryaKiran · Accepted solution]

You can use FIND() function to search the values of a variable and then create a new variable based on that.

if find(column1,'x','i') then new_col=column_x;
else if find(column1,'y','i') then new_col=column_y;
...................so on.