CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sassubstr
Truce
Truce

Reputation: 11

Substring and invert in SAS

I have a SAS data set with observations like this:

Abatucci Pierre*L'entrée au château*1000*1*75*91
Agneessens Edouard*Jeune femme*6000*1*40*32*5

where * is the field separator. How can I create a new variable that has First_name_letter+" "+Surname like this:

Abatucci Pierre ----> P Abatucci
Agneessens Eduard ----> E Agneessens

Upvotes: 0

Views: 415

Answers (2)

itzy
itzy

Reputation: 11755

The cleanest way to do this is with the Perl regular expression functionality that is built into SAS:

data names;
 set dataset;
 name = prxchange('s/(\w)\w* (\w+)/$2 $1/', -1, name);
run;

(I'm assuming that the *s in your question are actually field separators, because your other recent question asked how to deal with that.)

The expression (\w)\w* (\w+) causes the first letter of the first word of name and the second word of name to be put into variables $1 and $2. The rest of the command tells SAS to substitute $2 $1 for this variable.

Upvotes: 2

ArtCarpenter
ArtCarpenter

Reputation: 31

try this.

data name;
infile cards dlm='*';
length name name2 $35 entree $35;
input name entree calories portion cost weight;
name2=substr(scan(name,2,' '),1,1) ||' '||scan(name,1,' ');
datalines;
Abatucci Pierre*L'entrée au château*1000*1*75*91
Agneessens Edouard*Jeune femme*6000*1*40*32*5
run;

Upvotes: 2

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