You can use the ANYALPHA function in SAS to return the position of the first alphabetic character in a given string.

This function uses the following basic syntax:

ANYALPHA(expression, [start])

where:

• expression: The string to search
• start (optional): The starting position to search from.

The following example shows how to use this function in practice.

Example: Using the ANYALPHA Function in SAS

Suppose we have the following dataset in SAS that contains information about various employees at some company:

/*create dataset*/
data my_data;
    input employeeID $ sales;
    datalines;
0054A 23
0009A 38
0018B 40
09H30 12
04429 65
B1300 90
B1700 75
04498 35
0Y009 40
C6500 23
;
run;

/*view dataset*/
proc printdata=my_data;

We can use the ANYALPHA function to search for the position of the first alphabetic character in the employeeID column:

/*create new dataset*/
data new_data;
    set my_data;
    firstAlphaChar = anyalpha(employeeID);
run;

/*view new dataset*/
proc printdata=new_data;

The new column called firstAlphaChar displays the position of the first occurrence of any alphabetical character in the employeeID column.

For example, the first alphabetical character in the employee ID of row 1 occurs in the 5^th position.

If there are no alphabetical characters for a given employee ID, then a value of 0 is returned.

We can also use the start argument within the ANYALPHA function to specify a starting position to search from.

/*create new dataset*/
data new_data;
    set my_data;
    firstAlphaChar = anyalpha(employeeID, 2);
run;

/*view new dataset*/
proc printdata=new_data;

Notice that employeeID values that only contain an alphabetical character in the first position now receive a value of 0 in the firstAlphaChar column since the search for alphabetical characters now starts at position 2.

The following tutorials explain how to use other common functions in SAS: