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:<\/p>\n
Some people are morons.<\/strong><\/p>\n For example, say I were to ask you the following question:<\/p>\n “How old are you?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n A rather annoying percentage of people enter responses along the lines of:<\/p>\n I am 47 years old.<\/p>\n I just turned 21. Happy Birthday to me.<\/p>\n 36 years<\/p>\n 87 (yes, eighty-seven)<\/p>\n 54 yrs.<\/p>\n and so on ….<\/p>\n Just using the sub-string function to read in the first two characters won’t work, obviously.<\/p>\n 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: Well, wouldn’t you know ….<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2407"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2409,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407\/revisions\/2409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nvar age = prompt(“How old are you?”) ;<\/strong>
\n var ageyears = age.replace(\/[\\D]\/g, ”);<\/strong>
\nUsually, 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 \u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n
\nAge_numonly = compress(age,'0123456789','K');<\/strong><\/code><\/div>\n