CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sas
Lovnlust
Lovnlust

Reputation: 1537

compress function in SAS

I want to remove multiple blanks from a string.

%let CDate = 25Mar2015;

data _null_;
call symput('TitleDate',cat(put("&CDate."d,monname9.),', ',year("&CDate."d)));
run;

%put &TitleDate; /* March, 2015 */
%put Title is &TitleDate; /* multiple blanks between 'is' and 'March' */

I tried compress: %put Title is %sysfunc(compress(&TitleDate)); But it returns Title is March without year part.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1496

Answers (1)

Reeza
Reeza

Reputation: 21274

Very close, two modifications:

  1. CALL SYMPUTX instead of CALL SYMPUT

  2. WORDDATE20. format instead of the cat/put combinations

    call symputx('TitleDate',put("&CDate."d,worddate20.));

EDIT (to answer question in comments): The compress function takes 3 arguments, the first is mandatory and the last two are option.

The compress function doesn't work because what SAS is seeing is:

compress(March 25, 2015) This is an invalid call to the compress function. I think the compress function would assume the second argument would be 2015 and I don't know what it does with the 25. I would actually expect it to generate an error, but it doesn't.

If you did want to use the compress function to pass in a character value you would need to quote it using the %quote function, but that gets rid of all the spaces and I think you just wanted to get rid of the leading spaces. 

%put Title is %sysfunc(compress(%quote(&TitleDate.)));

Upvotes: 2

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