Hi Tom, Might I ask you for guidance on a slight modification to the code you sent?  Part of my requirement is to keep track of the position of the special character in a string.  So for example, if the variable called "RESULT" contains 5 characters and the 3rd character is a special character, then I need to output 1) the name of the variable, 2) the special character(s) and 3) the position(s) of the special character(s).  This is why I was looping through each character in the string.  My code works correctly if there is at least one NON-special character in the string, however, if all characters are special characters, it crashes.   I'm currently experimenting to see if I can combine my looping with the collate you taught me to resolve this 🙂     Thanks! ... View more

This is fantastic! I have never used COLLATE so this is a great learning experience for me.  Thank you sooo much! ... View more

Thank you, Patrick!  I am dealing with loads of them, since the data is coming from different countries.  Here's an example:  RESULT = תשובה לדוגמה.     My code currently uses substr to go character by character in every text string and identifies the position of a special character (if it finds one).  This is working perfectly except for the instances like my example above where the entire string is special characters.  In these cases SAS throws an error.  Here is my code - it may be too out of context but maybe you can follow it?  I'm just wondering why it won't do a substr if the whole value is special characters.   /* step through each character in the field to look for special character(s) */ do i = 1 to length(current_variable) ;           if rank(substr(current_variable),i,1)) gt 0 and rank(substr(current_variable),i,1)) lt 32 or rank(substr(current_variable),i,1)) gt 127 then do;                     position= i;                     char = byte(rank(substr(varvalue,i,1)));                     nonascii_pos = catx(',',nonascii_pos,strip(put(position,8.)));                     nonascii = catx(',',nonascii,strip(char ));           end; end;   Thanks for taking the time to answer my question! ... View more

Thank you very much for your response!  I ended up using a loop through ascii numbers and it worked. ... View more

Thank you, Tom!  That was a wonderful and clear explanation! I have learned something super useful today.   ... View more

@mkeintz This worked perfectly, THANK YOU, I appreciate your help and I learned something today!!! ... View more

PS it is also important I note that var1 may be empty as well   Thanks for your help, this is saving me! ... View more

Hi Tom,   Thanks for your reply!  My initial example of 'S' and 'D' were just me trying to give a simplified example to see if someone could just help me with how the logic would go.  Attached is some actual data and what my result needs to be, if this helps.  My task is to check if all populated variables in var1-var4 are equal or not.  If they are equal then my result should be 'Reviewer'.  If Any differ than my result should be 'Chair'.     Thanks! ... View more

Thank you for the reply!  I'm sorry my example didn't provide enough information - I've attached an Excel file with a portion of my dataset so you can see exactly what I'm working with.     My task if to check if all values populated in var1-var4 match (ignoring blanks).  If populated values match then the Result is 'Reviewer'.  If any of them are different then the Result is 'Chair'.   Thanks again! ... View more

No luck with the sorting, unfortunately.  I don't know if you feel like looking at this once more for me, but if so, I've attached the log, code and actual datasets.  Note there are more mentors than mentees so not every mentor will be assigned a mentee.  Thanks for any additional time you can give me on this! ... View more

Thank you so much!! ... View more

Hi!  This logic/code has been a great learning experience for me! Thank you so much.   I have a question, because I do need to run it again.  After the first run, about half of the mentees were assigned mentors.  In the resulting rand table there are still plenty of mentors that can be assigned to the mentees in the not_found datasets.   When I run it the first time it works great.  Then I remove the mentors and mentees who have been matched up and recreate the rand dataset based on the remaining mentors.  There should be additional matches but it's not finding any.    Can you help me understand how I rerun the process and drop the rand table?  Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!     ... View more