How to Use the ANYDIGIT Function in SAS

You can use the ANYDIGIT function in SAS to return the position of the first digit in a given string.

This function uses the following basic syntax:

ANYDIGIT(expression, [start])

where:

expression: The string to search
start (optional): The starting position to search from.

The following example shows how to use this function in practice.

Example: Using the ANYDIGIT Function in SAS

Suppose we have the following dataset in SAS that contains information about various employees at some company:

/*create dataset*/
data my_data;
    input employeeID $ sales;
    datalines;
54AAF 23
0009A 38
BC18B 40
09H30 12
04429 65
B1300 90
B1700 75
RRHHJ 35
0Y009 40
C6500 23
;
run;

/*view dataset*/
proc print data=my_data;

We can use the ANYDIGIT function to search for the position of the first digit in the employeeID column:

/*create new dataset*/
data new_data;
    set my_data;
    firstDigit = anydigit(employeeID);
run;

/*view new dataset*/
proc print data=new_data;

The new column called firstDigit displays the position of the first occurrence of any digt in the employeeID column.

For example:

The first digit in 54AAF is in position 1.
The first digit in 0009A is in position 1.
The first digit in BC18B is in position 3.

And so on.

If there are no digits for a given employee ID, then a value of 0 is returned.

We can also use the start argument within the ANYDIGIT function to specify a starting position to search from.

For example, we can use the following code to search for the position of the first digit in the employeeID column starting from position 3:

/*create new dataset*/
data new_data;
    set my_data;
    firstDigit = anydigit(employeeID, 3);
run;

/*view new dataset*/
proc print data=new_data;

Notice that employeeID values that only contain an alphabetical character in the first two positions now receive a value of 0 in the firstDigit column since the search for digits now starts at position 3.