Thursday, October 27, 2011

How to remove carriage return and linefeed characters within quoted strings.

HANDLING SPECIAL EMBEDDED CHARACTERS

To manage and report data in DBMS that contains very long text fields is not easy. This can be frustrating if the text field has special embedded symbols such as tabs, carriage returns (‘OD’x ), line feeds (‘OA’x) and page breaks. But here is simple SAS code which takes care of those issues.

The normal line end for Windows text files is a  carriage return character or a line feed character so
 The syntax for taking out all carriage return ('OD'x) and line feed ('OA'x) characters is
comment= Compress(comment,'0D0A'x);
                             or
comment= TRANWRD(comment,'0D0A'x,’’);

If you just want to take out the Carriage Return, use this code:
comment= TRANWRD(comment,'0D'x,'');

You could also try this one too..

Comment=compress(Comment, ,"kw");*k is for keep, w is for "write-able";


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