Functions and CALL Routines under z/OS

ANYPUNCT Function: z/OS

Searches a string for a punctuation character and returns the first position at which that character is found.

Category:	Character
z/OS specifics:	fileref
See:	ANYPUNCT Function in SAS Language Reference: Dictionary

Syntax
Arguments
Details
Comparisons
Examples
See Also

Syntax

ANYPUNCT(string <,start>)

Arguments

string: is the character constant, variable, or expression to search.
start: is an optional integer that specifies the position at which the search should start and the direction in which to search.

Details

The results of the ANYPUNCT function depend directly on the translation table that is in effect (see TRANTAB= System Option in the SAS National Language Support (NLS): Reference Guide) and indirectly on the ENCODING and LOCALE system options.

The ANYPUNCT function searches a string for the first occurrence of a punctuation character. If such a character is found, ANYPUNCT returns the position in the string of that character. If no such character is found, ANYPUNCT returns a value of 0.

If you use only one argument, ANYPUNCT begins the search at the beginning of the string. If you use two arguments, the absolute value of the second argument, start, specifies the position at which to begin the search. The direction in which to search is determined in the following way:

If the value of start is positive, the search proceeds to the right.
If the value of start is negative, the search proceeds to the left.
If the value of start is less than the negative length of the string, the search begins at the end of the string.

ANYPUNCT returns a value of zero when

the character that you are searching for is not found
the value of start is greater than the length of the string
the value of start = 0.

Note: For z/OS systems, the ANYPUNCT function by default reports a small list of characters as punctuation. This restraint of the function is a holdover from older systems that defined a limited set of printable characters. To use a current definition of the punctuation characters, specify an appropriate LOCALE option value (for example, LOCALE=ENGLISH). [cautionend]

Comparisons

The ANYPUNCT function searches a character expression for a punctuation character. The NOTPUNCT function searches a character expression for a character that is not a punctuation character.

Examples

The following example uses the ANYPUNCT function to search a string for punctuation characters.

data _null_;    
   string='Next = _n_ + 12E3;';  
   j=0;  
   do until(j=0);  
      j=anypunct(string,j+1);  
      if j=0 then put +3 "That's all";  
      else do;          
         c=substr(string,j,1);  
         put +3 j= c=;  
      end; 
   end;
run;

The following lines are written to the SAS log:

   j=6 c==
   j=8 c=_
   j=10 c=_
   j=12 c=+
   j=18 c=;
   That's all