How to split a column into multiple rows in SAS - sas

I have a SAS table that I imported from Oracle with two fields. SYSTEMID and T_BLOB.
Inside the T_BLOB field there is data:
2203 Mountain Meadow===========OSCAR ST===========Zephyrhill Road
(why they are delimiting with equal signs I do not know nor do I know who to ask).
I'm new to SAS and I'm being asked to split T_BLOB field into multiple rows in a table called rick.split_blob. I tried Google but I can't find the exact example. I'm trying to get the output to look like:
SYSTEM_ID T_BLOB
GID_1 2203 Mountain Ave
GID_1 OSCAR ST
GID_1 Zephyrhill Road
Can anyone help me with how to code this?

If none of the values ever contain = then you can just use the scan() function.
data want;
set have ;
length T_BLOB_VALUE $200 ;
do i=1 by 1 until(t_blob_value=' ');
t_blob_value=scan(t_blob,i,'=') ;
if i=1 or t_blob_value ne ' ' then output;
end;
run;

You could try this:
data rick.split_blob (keep=SYSTEM_ID T_BLOB_SUB rename=(T_BLOB_SUB=T_BLOB));
set orig_dataset;
T_BLOB_TRANS = tranwrd(T_BLOB,"===========","|");
do i = 1 to countw(T_BLOB_TRANS,"|");
T_BLOB_SUB = scan(T_BLOB,i,"|");
output;
end;
run;
What I'm trying to do is first translate the odd string of equals signs to a simple pipe to avoid counting them as consecutive delimiters. Then we determine how many "words" (really - delimited strings) there are in T_BLOB_TRANS so we know how many times to run the DO loop. Finally we read everything between each delimiter and output it to a new T_BLOB variable for each new word.

It looks like you'll want to use a combination of the "scan" function and the "output" statement (with countw to get you the number of words if it is variable). Scan returns the nth word where you can specify the delimiter. Output outputs a record. So, for example, you can say
do i=1 to countw(line);
newvar = scan(line,i);
output;
end;

Related

How do I drop the home phone number if it is the same as the cell phone number in SAS?

I have a list of people who may have a cellphone number, a home phone number, or both. The dataset often has the same number listed for both the cellphone number and the home phone number. This is what I am trying to do for each record:
if cellphonenumber = (homephonenumber) then keep (cellphonenumber) and drop (homephonenumber)
I've tried different combinations and cannot get it to work. I am competent in writing SQL and VBA for Access and have branched into SAS. I know the syntax is different and that Access does not have the full library (i.e. does not recognize "distinct").
Here are two ways. SQL is supported in SAS, but you should familiarize yourself with the data step since it's one of SAS's most powerful tools.
Data Step
Let's assume your data looks like this:
id home cell
1 111-111-0123
2 222-222-0123 222-222-0123
3 333-333-0123 444-444-0123
If you want to remove the home phone number, then simple if-then logic will work fine. In SAS, ' ' is missing for character columns, and . for numeric. You can optionally use the call missing() subroutine to automatically set it for you.
data want;
set have;
if(home = cell) then home = ' ';
run;
SQL
You can also do this in SQL:
proc sql;
create table want as
select id
, CASE
when(home = cell) then home = ' '
else home
END as home
, cell
from have
;
quit;
Other info
If your data is not clean and has leading or trailing blanks, you can loop through all of your character columns to ensure that all leading/trailing blanks are removed. If you need to standardize your home/cell numbers, you'll need to do some additional standardization logic (note that if you have access to SAS Data Quality Server, all of that can be done for you automatically).
The below will loop through every character variable and run the strip() function to remove leading and trailing blanks for every row.
data want;
set have;
array charvars[*] _CHARACTER_;
do i = 1 to dim(charvars);
charvars[i] = strip(charvars[i]);
end;
if(home = cell) then home = ' ';
drop i;
run;
Take a look at SAS's free e-learning for training on SAS programming concepts.

How to search for a word in a string of possibly misspelled words

I am looking for a specific employer in a SAS data set. The data set has not been reviewed for spelling so if I am looking for Univ it could be entered as Unversity, University, Univercity ...
I've tried scaning, counting the matching letters, 'contains'. These are work but I am still missing some.
proc sql;
create table SpecificEmployers as
select *
, case when employer contains 'Univ' then 'Y'
else 'N' end as Emp
from AllEmployers
;quit;
In this case, rather than searching for a substring, I would suggest searching individual characters which can occur most commonly such as U, N, V etc. Then you can keep only those values which have all these characters available. For example- I have used findc function to search the string which has U, N and V
data have;
input string $15.;
datalines;
uNiverstY
UNVERSTy
college
univercity
school
schools
UNIVERSITY
Uversity
unvarcity
school123
;
run;
proc sql;
select string from have
where findc(upcase(string),'U')>=1
and findc(upcase(string),'N')>=1
and findc(upcase(string),'V')>=1;
quit;
proc print data=want; run;
using upcase will also make your task easy .. so you don't have to worry about the case. You can put as many conditions as you need depending on the value
You should investigate some of the edit distance functions:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a002206133.htm
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a002206137.htm
One approach would be to loop through each word in the employer name and see if any of the individual words has an edit distance below a certain threshold when compared to the string university.

SAS: Transform variable into time series in text file import - length greater than 32.767

I get a calendar file from a vendor containing all holidays for a specific calendar.
The file contain 7 columns separated by a pipe (|). However column 7 that contain the actual holiday comes in a string format separated by semi-colon (;).
My problem is that column 7 has a length greater than 32.767 - then the solution I have done so far using some array and transpose tricks doesn't work anymore.
Basically the text file looks like:
INTERNAL_NAME|ERROR_CODE|NUMBER_OF_FIELDS|CALENDAR_CODE|CALENDAR_TYPE|CALENDAR_NAME|DATES
US|0|4|US|Country|United States|;2;15728;1;5;19440101;5;19440102;5;19440103;5;19440108;5;19440109......etc.
However column 7 is delivered in a nice format so that the size of the array/matrix is given and the delimiter is given at the start of the string.
*1st charachter = delimiter -> ;
*Number of dimensions in matrix -> 2
*Number of rows in matrix -> 15.728
*Number of columns -> 1
*Data elements + Data -> 5 = Date and Data=01JAN1944 etc.
My desired result would be a dataset looking like
INTERNAL_NAME DATES
US 01JAN1944
US 02JAN1944
US 03JAN1944
US 08JAN1944
etc. until 15.728 observations is read.....
You can do this fairly easily.
The manual solution, i.e., assuming the fields are just as you say they are, is to use the secondary delimiter (;) and then you can parse that initial string on your own later since it's known to be shorter. Then iterate the inputs of that string, using # to hold the line.
data want;
infile datalines4 dlm=';' truncover;
length initial_string $500;
input initial_String $ #;
input dim row col #;
do _n_ = 1 by 1 until (missing(holiday_date));
input col_type holiday_Date #;
if not missing(holiday_date) then output;
end;
datalines4;
US|0|4|US|Country|United States|;2;15728;1;5;19440101;5;19440102;5;19440103;5;19440108;5;19440109
;;;;
run;
If you want to use that information that tells you about the delimiter/etc. to drive the readin, you could do that, but it would take two passes on the data file (unless it has a limited set of possibilities and you could just use if/else branching with those limited set of input statements). One pass would read just that part, then call a macro to read in the rest in a separate data step. But if this is always the format of the file, and you don't really care about those fields - you just have to work with them being there - the above is probably better as it's faster and less complicated.

Adding a new Column to existing SAS dataset

I have a SAS dataset that I have created by reading in a .txt file. It has about 20-25 rows and I'd like to add a new column that assigns an alphabet in serial order to each row.
Row 1 A
Row 2 B
Row 3 C
.......
It sounds like a really basic question and one that should have an easy solution, but unfortunately, I'm unable to find this anywhere. I get solutions for adding new calculated columns and so on, but in my case, I just want to add a new column to my existing datatable - there is no other relation between the variables.
This is kind of ugly and if you have more than 26 rows it will start to use random ascii characters. But it does solve the problem as defined by the question.
Test data:
data have;
do row = 1 to 26;
output;
end;
run;
Explanation:
On my computer, the letter 'A' is at position 65 in the ASCII table (YMMV). We can determine this by using this code:
data _null_;
pos = rank('A');
put pos=;
run;
The ASCII table will position the alphabet sequentially, so that B will be at position 66 (if A is at 65 and so on).
The byte() function returns a character from the ASCII table at a certain position. We can take advantage of this by using the position of ASCII character A as an offset, subtracting 1, then adding the row number (_n_) to it.
Final Solution:
data want;
set have;
alphabet = byte(rank('A')-1 + _n_);
run;
Not better than Tom's but a brute force alternative essentially. Create the string of Alpha and then use CHAR() to identify character of interest.
data want;
set sashelp.class;
retain string 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
letter = char(string, _n_);
run;

Create dynamic SAS variable name from string

I have something similar to the code below, I want to create every 2 character combination within my strings and then count the occurrence of each and store in a table. I will be changing the substr statement to a do loop to iterate through the whole string. But for now I just want to get the first character pair to work;
data temp;
input cat $50.;
call symput ('regex', substr(cat,1,2));
&regex = count(cat,substr(cat,1,2));
datalines;
bvbvbsbvbvbvbvblb
dvdvdvlxvdvdgd
cdcdcdcdvdcdcdvcdcded
udvdvdvdevdvdvdvdvdvdvevdedvdv
dvdkdkdvdkdkdkudvkdkd
kdkvdkdkvdkdkvudkdkdukdvdkdkdkdv
dvkvwduvwdedkd
;
run;
Expected results;
cat bv dv cd ud kd
#### 6
#### 4
#### 8
#### 1
#### 3
#### 9
#### 1
I'd prefer not to use a proc transpose as I can't loop through the string to create all the character pairs. I'll have to manually create them and I have upto 500 characters per string, plus I would like to search for 3 and 4 string patterns.
You can't do what you're asking to directly. You will either have to use the macro language, or use PROC TRANSPOSE. SAS doesn't let you reference data in the way you're trying to, because it has to have already constructed the variable names and such before it reads anything in.
I'll post a different solution that uses the macro language, but I suspect TRANSPOSE is the ultimate solution here; there's no practical reason this shouldn't work with your actual problem, and if you're having trouble with that it should be possible to help - post the do loop and what you're wanting, and we can of course help. Likely you just need to put the OUTPUT in the do loop.
data temp;
input cat $50.;
cat_val = substr(cat,1,2);
_var_ = count(cat,substr(cat,1,2));
output;
datalines;
bvbvbsbvbvbvbvblb
dvdvdvlxvdvdgd
cdcdcdcdvdcdcdvcdcded
udvdvdvdevdvdvdvdvdvdvevdedvdv
dvdkdkdvdkdkdkudvkdkd
kdkvdkdkvdkdkvudkdkdukdvdkdkdkdv
dvkvwduvwdedkd
;
run;
proc transpose data=temp out=temp_T(drop=_name_);
by cat notsorted; *or by some ID variable more likely;
id cat_val;
var _var_;
run;
Here's a solution that uses CALL EXECUTE rather than the macro language, as I decided that was actually a better solution. I wouldn't use this in production, but it hopefully shows the concept (in particular, I would not run a PROC DATASETS for each variable separately - I would concat all the renames into one string then run that at the end. I thought this better for showing how the process might work.)
This takes advantage of timing - namely, CALL EXECUTE happens after the data step terminates, so by that point you do know what variable maps to what data point. It does have to pass the data twice in order to drop the spurious variables, though if you either know the actual number of variables you want to have, or if you're okay with the excess variables hanging around, it would be okay to skip that, and PROC DATASETS doesn't actually open the whole dataset, so it would be quite fast (even the above with five calls is quite fast).
data temp;
input cat $50.;
array _catvars[50]; *arbitrary 50 chosen here - pick one big enough for your data;
array _catvarnames[50] $ _temporary_;
cat_val = substr(cat,1,2);
_iternum = whichc(cat_val, of _catvarnames[*]);
if _iternum=0 then do;
_iternum = whichc(' ',of _catvarnames[*]);
_catvarnames[_iternum]=cat_val;
call execute('proc datasets lib=work; modify temp; rename '||vname(_catvars[_iternum])||' = '||cat_val||'; quit;');
end;
_catvars[_iternum]= count(cat,substr(cat,1,2));
if _n_=7 then do; *this needs to actually be a test for end-of-file (so add `end=eof` to the set statement or infile), but you cannot do that in DATALINES so I hardcode the example.;
call execute('data temp; set temp; drop _catvars'||put(whichc(' ',of _catvarnames[*]),2. -l)||'-_catvars50;run;');
end;
datalines;
bvbvbsbvbvbvbvblb
dvdvdvlxvdvdgd
cdcdcdcdvdcdcdvcdcded
udvdvdvdevdvdvdvdvdvdvevdedvdv
dvdkdkdvdkdkdkudvkdkd
kdkvdkdkvdkdkvudkdkdukdvdkdkdkdv
dvkvwduvwdedkd
;
run;