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Extracting first letter of each word in SAS Programming

data have;
input full_names 50.;
datalines;
Austin Richard Post
Quavious Keyate Marshall
David John McDonald
Jonathan Lyndale Kirk
;
run;

Required output first letter of each word as follows

ARP QKM DJM JLK

Solution

  • Something that works regardless of the number of names.

    • COUNTW to determine the number of words
    • CATT to concatenate the first initials

    FYI - your sample data step is incorrect and does not run as posted.

    data initials;
set have;
nwords = countw(full_names);
length initials $8.;

initials = '';
do i=1 to nwords;
   initials = catt(initials, substr(scan(full_names, i), 1, 1));
end;

drop i nwords;
run;