SAS remove the last characters if special

Question

I have a sas dataset with the variable called response, which has the following records:

and so on.

These are all the same records, I need to remove the last character wherever special and return the records as

When I use a compress function, it removes the asterisk in between and returns: TrailerOffer which is not what I want. Can somebody please help me code this? I need to remove the last characters if these are special.

Answer 1

You can use regular expression character classes to specify the 'special' trailing characters. In this example replacement pattern, any characters that are not letters or numbers will be removed. \s* is needed before $ because SAS character variables will have trailing spaces when their values are passed to the regex engine.

Learn more about regular expression class groupings in the SAS documentation

data have;
length response $20.; input response; datalines;
Trailer*Offer
Trailer*Offer*
Trailer*Offer???
Trailer*Offer?...
Offer#1
Offer#1?
Offer#1*?
;
data want;
  set have;
  response = prxchange ('s/[^a-z0-9]+\s*$//i', 1, response);
run;