SAS remove the last characters if special-CodePudding

I have a sas dataset with the variable called response, which has the following records:

and so on.

These are all the same records, I need to remove the last character wherever special and return the records as

When I use a compress function, it removes the asterisk in between and returns: TrailerOffer which is not what I want. Can somebody please help me code this? I need to remove the last characters if these are special.

CodePudding user response：

You can use regular expression character classes to specify the 'special' trailing characters. In this example replacement pattern, any characters that are not letters or numbers will be removed. \s* is needed before $ because SAS character variables will have trailing spaces when their values are passed to the regex engine.

Learn more about regular expression class groupings in the

CodePudding user response：

Using PRXCHANGE

prx=prxchange("s/^W*(.*?)\W*$/$1/",-1, response);

will remove trailing special characters

data have;
length response $20.;
response="Trailer*Offer";output;
response="Trailer*Offer*";output;
response="Trailer*Offer???";output;
response="Trailer*Offer?...";output;
run;

data _null_;
set have;
prx=prxchange("s/^W*(.*?)\W*$/$1/",-1, response);
put prx;
run;

 77         
 78         data _null_;
 79         set have;
 80         prx=prxchange("s/^W*(.*?)\W*$/$1/",-1, response);
 81         put prx;
 82         run;
 
 Trailer*Offer
 Trailer*Offer
 Trailer*Offer
 Trailer*Offer