Date:         Fri, 26 May 2006 10:33:35 -0700
Reply-To:     "Pardee, Roy" <pardee.r@GHC.ORG>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Pardee, Roy" <pardee.r@GHC.ORG>
Subject:      Incrementally add to a character var in a do loop?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Hey All,

After a collegue hipped me to the new propcase() function in v9 I
thought I'd try porting some ruby code I have for pretty-casing
names/addresses to sas.  But I'm stumped early on it seems--I'd like to
loop through the words contained in my char var & then tack them on to
the end of a new var one by one (after making semi-intelligent choices
about which (bits of) each word need to be up- or down- cased).  But
when I run this code:

data nom ;
   length name $ 35 ;
   input name 1-35 ;
datalines ;
ROY EDMUND PARDEE III, ESQ
;
run ;

data gnu ;
   length __word pretty_name $ 35 ;
   set nom ;
   __i = 1 ;
   __word = scan(name, __i) ;
   pretty_name = propcase(__word) || '~' ;

   do while (__word ne "") ;
      put __word = ;
      pretty_name = pretty_name || propcase(__word) || '~' ;
      __i + 1 ;
      __word = scan(name, __i)  ;

   end ;

   drop __: ;
run ;

proc print ;

run ;

I wind up w/just "Roy" in pretty_name, even though I can see from the
put statement in my while loop that __word is changing on each
iteration, just as I expected.  I don't even see the tilde characters.
Is || not the append operator for strings in sas?

Many thanks for any help!

-Roy

P.S. In case anybody's interested, here's the ruby code:

   # These we want to stay upcase.
   @abbreviations  = %w(PO NE NW SE SW P.O. N.E. N.W. S.E. S.W. C/O P.O)
   # Downcase for these ordinal suffixes.
   @suffixes       = %w(ST ND RD TH)
   # Upcase the letter immediately following these.
   @prefixes       = %w(Mc O' D')
   # Dashes, slashes, and other markers of apt numbers & other things
that should be upcased.
   @dash_reg       = Regexp.new("([#-/\"][A-Za-z])")


   # Pretty version of prettify2--by David Black.
   def CaseManager.prettify4(address)
      address.split(' ').each do |word|
        word.capitalize! unless (@abbreviations.include?(word) or
                                  word[0..0] =~ /[0-9#]/ )
        word[2..2] = word[2..2].upcase if
                                  @prefixes.include?(word[0..1])
        word[-2, 2] = word[-2, 2].downcase if
                                  @suffixes.include?(word[-2,2])
      end.join(' ').gsub(@dash_reg) { $1.upcase }
   end