susbtr a string of characters

[JNWong]

HI,

  AS I am confronted with a problem about'substr', now i just want to get the first two characters from the string of characters.

like : apple juice is my favorite food. i need the 'apple juice'.

   i have tried to parse the string and get the var1 for 'apple', var2 for 'juice' and coding like this ' m1 = substr(food,1,compress(var1!!var2)), however, the result is all characters in the string which is not i wanted.

i am wondering the better solution to it and the reasons why 'compress' not work out.

Thank you!

[PGStats · Accepted solution]

length twoWords $16;
twoWords = catx(" ", scan(food, 1), scan(food, 2));