Compress Function: How to Remove Blank Spaces or Selected Characters From a Character Value

The COMPRESS function is often used to remove blank spaces from a character value.

Let’s look at some examples.

The data set above contains a single character value.

data string2;
set string;
comp = compress(text);
run;

The COMPRESS function compresses the character value and removes all of the blank spaces from the string.

Remove Selected Characters from Character Value​

You can also specify a character to be removed in the COMPRESS function.

data string2;
set string;
comp = compress(text, ‘a’ );
run;

The character ‘a’ is specified in the second parameter of the COMPRESS function. It is removed from the text.

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Remove Multiple Characters from Character Value

Multiple characters can be removed simultaneously in the COMPRESS function.

data string2;
set string;
comp = compress(text, ‘abc’ );
run;

The 3 letters ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ are specified in the second parameters.

​All 3 letters are removed from the text.

Please note that the capital letters ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ remain in the text. You can add a modifier in the third parameter to ignore case of the characters to be removed.

Ignore Case of Characters To Be Removed​

Adding the ‘i’ modifier to the third parameter of the COMPRESS function tells SAS to ignore the case of the characters when removing them from the text.

data string2;
set string;
comp = compress(text, ‘abc’, ‘i’ );
run;

In this example, all 6 letters of ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ are removed from the string.

data string2;
set string;
comp = compress(text, ”, ‘a’ );
run;

In addition to the blank space specified in the second parameter, the ‘a’ modifier in the third parameter tells SAS to remove all of the alphabetic characters from the text.

data string2;
set string;
comp = compress(text, ”, ‘d’ );
run;

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