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Showing posts with the label left functions
Extracting the First Three Alphabetic Characters in SAS: A Comparative Guide Extracting the First Three Alphabetic Characters in SAS: A Comparative Guide When working with "Agreement" numbers that contain both alphabetic and numeric characters, there are several approaches you can use in SAS to extract the first three alphabetic characters. Below, I’ll discuss three common methods: substr with findc , substr with compress , and substr with left . Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, depending on the structure of your data and your specific needs. Approach 1: substr with findc char_part = substr(Agreement, 1, findc(Agreement, '0123456789')-1); Explanation: This approach finds the position of the first numeric character in the Agreement string using findc , and then extracts all characters before that position using substr . It works well if the alphabetic part of the "Agreement" is always at the beginnin...