Sas9 Replace special characters with underscores

Question

In Sas9, how can I replace all the , \ / or spaces, and other special characters of my choosing with underscores? A solution either in a datastep or in macro functions would do the trick, I'm just looking for a method to do it.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use the Perl regular expression functionality built into SAS.

data tmp;
 set tmp;
 var1 = prxchange('s/[,\/\\]/_/', -1, var);
run;

or something similar.