Urgent question about string

[iren]

I have ID ADAM19480204M
(name+year+month+day+gender)
I need to rebuid it in order it looks like the following:
ADAM194802M (name+year+month+gender)

(Name can vary up to 5 letters)
In other words I need to take out DAY part.
Could you give me a hand, please , with this code?
Thank you in advance,

 

[ChrisW75]

Hmmm.
That's a fiddly one, however it shouldn't be too difficult.
You need a selection of functions here to achieve your goal.
substr(<variable>,<start position>,<length>)
length(<variable>)
compress(<variable>,<characters to remove>)

The way I'd approach this is to first find the length of the field, then cut the gender out.

  length = length(ID);
  gender = substr(ID,length,1);
  ID2 = substr(ID,1,length-1);

This should give you a new ID field without the gender on the end. Now, if you get rid of any numbers in the field, you'll just be left with the name.

  name = compress(ID2,'1234567890');
  name_length = length(name);

Now we want to get the date bits out.

  year  = substr(ID2,name_length + 1,4);
  month = substr(ID2,name_length + 5,2);
  day   = substr(ID2,name_length + 7,2);

Now all you need to do is concatenate the bits you want back together again.
You might need to fiddle with the numbers a little to get things lined up correctly, I frequently get them wrong first time, so check that carefully.



Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.