Date:         Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:31:40 -0500
Reply-To:     Joe Matise <snoopy369@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Joe Matise <snoopy369@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Re: Read missing values with scan function
Comments: To: Samuel Escarigo <samuel.escarigo@rbs.co.uk>
In-Reply-To:  <201008201426.o7KDawqW027435@malibu.cc.uga.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

SCAN will ignore consecutive delimiters, and I don't know of a way to tell
it not to (this is annoying sometimes, so if it's possible someone please
post how!).

One thing you could do is translate '.,' to '. ,' [and every permutation of
this that is possible in your data].

Like so:

 data _null_;
   *set test;
   longtext= 'var1,3.,var2.54,var3.12';
   longtext=tranwrd(longtext,'.,','. ,');
   scan1 = scan(longtext,1,',.');
   scan2 = scan(longtext,2,',.');
   scan3 = scan(longtext,3,',.');
   scan4 = scan(longtext,4,',.');
   put longtext=;
   put scan1= scan2= scan3= scan4=;
 run;

If your data isn't harmed by it, you could just turn every ',' into ', ' and
every '.' to '. ' (or ' .' if that's better); but I don't know your data to
say if that's acceptable or not.

-Joe

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Samuel Escarigo
<samuel.escarigo@rbs.co.uk>wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> In the following example, where I have a string with dot and comma
> delimited values, how can I read the missing value into variable scan3?
>
>  data _null_;
>    set test;
>    longtext= 'var1,3.,var2.54,var3.12';
>    scan1 = scan(longtext,1,',.');
>    scan2 = scan(longtext,2,',.');
>    scan3 = scan(longtext,3,',.');
>    scan4 = scan(longtext,4,',.');
>    put longtext=;
>    put scan1= scan2= scan3= scan4=;
>  run;
>
>  longtext=var1,3.,var2.54,var3.12
>  scan1=var1 scan2=3 scan3=var2 scan4=54
>
>
> As you can see, with my current code, scan3 is getting the following word
> ('var2') and scan4 is 54 instead of 'var2'...
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Samuel
>