And the questioner needs to verify that it is the LAST four characters that are not blank that he or she wishes to remove.

-Mary

----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Matise" <snoopy369@GMAIL.COM> To: <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 9:42 AM Subject: Re: what wrong with my code ?

> Actually, LENGTH should trim the trailing blanks fine. (From the > documentation: > "Returns the length of a non-blank character string, excluding trailing > blanks, and returns 1 for a blank character string") > > To avoid errors printing in the log, it's better to say: > if length(val) GT 4 then y = ... > and then have an alternate processing method if it's LE 4. > > However, given the data, it's possible that NAME is always GT 4, in which > case this is not the error - hence the request for more information. > > -Joe > > > On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 9:37 AM, karma <dorjetarap@googlemail.com> wrote: > >> try striping the trailing blanks before passing to substring with >> either trim or strip. >> >> Joe raises a good point in that for strings less than 4 in length, you >> will get undesirable results. You could use an if-then to handle these >> cases, or if you have sas9 then the coalescec or the ifn function can >> help abbreviate the code. Possibly something like the following: >> >> y=coalescec(substr(val, 1,length(trim(val))-4),val) ; >> >> Not tested: don't have SAS9. >> >> 2009/5/4 ash007 <RamsamyAshley@gmail.com>: >> > Hi, >> > >> > how can I remove the last 4 characters. >> > >> > this code doesn't work. >> > >> > thanks. >> > >> > >> > data datasetlist_new; >> > set datasetlist; >> > if upcase(x) = "TEMP" then y = substr(Name,1,length(Name)-4); >> > run; >> > >>