Getting only numbers, in SAS and Javascript

The advantage of learning a new language is it sometimes makes you re-think the old languages you know. For example, here is a problem that happens often:

Some people are morons.

For example, say I were to ask you the following question:

“How old are you?”

YOU would probably answer something like, 42 or 21. You didn’t mistake that for an essay question, now, did you? That, my dear reader, is because YOU are not a moron. However, trust me when I tell you that other people are not as smart as you.

A rather annoying percentage of people enter responses along the lines of:

I am 47 years old.

I just turned 21. Happy Birthday to me.

36 years

87 (yes, eighty-seven)

54 yrs.

and so on ….

Just using the sub-string function to read in the first two characters won’t work, obviously.

Well, I was doing something in javascript where I asked the person their age and then stripped off everything but numbers before I tried to use the age they had given me, like so:
var age = prompt(“How old are you?”) ;
var ageyears = age.replace(/[\D]/g, ”);
Usually, in my SAS programs, I would either just define age as a numeric variable and all of those who included text had their values set to missing. Or, if I wanted to minimize missing data, I would write a statement  to just read in the first two characters, or maybe to strip out “years” and “yrs”. However, in the latest data set I have, it seems to be a sample of people who are creatively annoying, so I had to settle for a lot of missing data or do something else. I got to thinking that there MUST be some function in SAS that does something similar.

Well, wouldn’t you know ….

Having the ‘K’ at the end reverses what the COMPRESS function normally does and instead of deleting your numbers it keeps them. I don’t know how I did not know this. Maybe I knew it at one point and forgot it? Be sure you have the ‘K’ in quotes, by the way.

Well, now I have it stored in my blog, which is better than having it in memory, because unlike my memory, this blog gets backed up regularly.