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SAS Tip of the Month
January 2008

When looking at a SAS program you are likely to see something like the following when dealing with text strings:

    rslt_string=TRIM(LEFT(original_string));

What this did was left align the text in the variable original_string and then remove any blanks after the last character.

In SAS 9 a new function was introduced called STRIP that does the same task but with one function so the original code above can instead be written as:

    rslt_string=STRIP(original_string);

If you are still using an older version of SAS you could do the same thing with a macro, using the following code:

    %MACRO STRIP(intxt); /*INTXT=text variable*/
        TRIM(LEFT(&intxt))
    %MEND STRIP;
    rslt_string=%STRIP(original_string);

You may wonder why there is no ';' at the end of the code inside the macro definition? This allows for the macro to be called inside the code multiple times, as the following example demonstrates:

    rslt_string=%STRIP(original_string_A)||%STRIP(original_string_B);