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In SAS, the COMPRESS function can be used to remove special characters from a string. This function takes two arguments, a source string and a list of characters to remove. The list of characters can be specified as a string of characters or as a character set. Once the function is applied, it will return a new string with all of the specified characters removed.
The easiest way to remove special characters from a string in SAS is to use the function with the ‘kas’ modifier.
This function uses the following basic syntax:
data new_data;
set original_data;
remove_specials = compress(some_string, , 'kas');
run;
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Remove Special Characters from String in SAS
Suppose we have the following dataset in SAS that contains the names of various employees and their total sales:
/*create dataset*/
data data1;
input name $ sales;
datalines;
Bob&%^ 45
M&$#@ike 50
Randy)) 39
Chad!? 14
Dan** 29
R[on] 44
;
run;
/*view dataset*/
proc print data=data1;
Notice that the values in the name column contain several special characters.
We can use the COMPRESS function to remove these special characters:
/*create second dataset with special characters removed from names*/
data data2;
set data1;
new_name=compress(name, , 'kas');
run;
/*view dataset*/
proc print data=data2;
Notice that the new_name column contains the values in the name column with the special characters removed.
Here’s exactly what the COMPRESS function did to remove these special characters:
- k specifies that we would like to ‘keep’ certain characters
- a specifies to keep alphabetic characters
- s specifies to keep space characters
Note: You can find a complete list of modifiers for the COMPRESS function on this .