COMPRESS

Function: COMPRESS

Purpose: To remove specified characters from a character value. When used with k modifier , compress can be used to keep characters (such as digits) in a character value and remove everything else.

Syntax:  COMPRESS(character-value <,'compress-list'> <,'modifiers'>)

            character-value is any SAS character value.

compress-list  is an optional list of the characters you want to remove. If this argument is omitted, the default character to be removed is a blank. If you include a list of characters to remove, only those characters will be removed (unless the 'k' modifier is used). If a blank is not included in the list, blanks will not be removed

  modifiers is an optional list of modifiers that refer to character classes For example, the a modifier refers to all uppercase and lowercase characters. The following are some of the more useful modifiers: 

	a     include all uppercase and lowercase letters. d     include all digits s  include all space characters (blanks, horizontal and vertical tabs, carriage return, linefeed, and formfeed).           i    ignore the case of characters. k   keep the characters listed in the compress-list or referenced by the modifiers instead of removing them.include all punctuation characters.referenced by the modifiers instead of removing them. p  include all punctuation characters.          Note that the modifiers can be in uppercase or lowercase. If a length has not been previously assigned, the length of the resulting variable will be the length of the first argument.

Example: Using the Compress function                                      

In the following examples, CHAR = "A C123XYZ".

Function                                                                    Returns

COMPRESS("A C XYZ") COMPRESS("(908) 777-1234"," (-)") COMPRESS(CHAR,,'as') COMPRESS(CHAR,"0123456789") COMPRESS(CHAR,,'d') COMPRESS(CHAR,"ABC",'d') COMPRESS(CHAR,,'kd')

"ACXYZ" "9087771234" "123" "A CXYZ" "A CXYZ" " XYZ" "123"