Appropriate Data Analysis

Our story

We are a company established in 1994 to provide statistical services to the pharmaceutical industry. Since then, we have created award-winning statistical models for direct marketing, worked on donor support for a large charity, provided data warehousing solutions in banking and insurance and now, in these challenging times, our primary focus is in supporting the development of medicines for cancer patients.

Our vision remains the same. No nonsense, appropriate data analysis.

Losing rogue characters in a SAS variable

I once had a problem with telephone numbers: there could be hyphens, brackets, spaces and other extraneous characters that make standardising the value difficult.

I could use the compress() function, but there's always the possibility that I missed a strange character. But compress could be applied twice:

step1=compress(vrname,'0123456789') - this will lose everything from the record apart from the rogue characters, and so

newname=compress(vrname,compress(vrname,'0123456789'));

will look at the record again, and remove the rubbish.

Elegant, eh?

"¡No pasarán!"

Nerd's corner

Useful advice of the month for programmers to be changed from time to time

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” - Albert Einstein

Salford Rugby League Football Club

Early 20th Century

vincent.jones@redgulldata.net