Start your own thread, and give it a meaningful subject line; adding a post to a thread that is 8(!) years old won't get you many responses Provide example data, so we know what you are talking about. Usable example data means posting a DATA step with DATALINES (or a simple assignment if one observation is sufficient) Show what you expect to get out of that Posting unreasonable conditions makes no sense; if a certain function is ideal for your task, use it ... View more

Proc Univariate is designed for Exploratory Data Analysis.  There are several options - eg for stem and leaf analysis. Richard ... View more

If you are sure the problem is in the company names you could use the following where clause to screen out all names which include anything besides standard English letter, numerals and spaces: where company_name = compress (company_name, ' AD', 'K') ; (this instructs the compress function to discard every character unless it is a space, English letter, or digit, in this instance the 'K' modifier says 'keep those') You may have to add in the registered trade mark symbol (small R in a circle) if your companies use it. Richard ... View more