Functions and CALL Routines

ANYCNTRL Function

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

Category:	Character
Restriction:	I18N Level 2

Syntax
Arguments
Details
Comparisons
Examples
See Also

Syntax

ANYCNTRL(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 ANYCNTRL function depend directly on the translation table that is in effect (see TRANTAB System Option) and indirectly on the ENCODING System Option and the LOCALE System Option in the SAS National Language Support (NLS): Reference Guide.

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

If you use only one argument, ANYCNTRL 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.

ANYCNTRL returns a value of zero when one of the following is true:

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.

Comparisons

The ANYCNTRL function searches a character string for a control character. The NOTCNTRL function searches a character string for a character that is not a control character.

Examples

You can execute the following program to show the control characters that are identified by the ANYCNTRL function.

data test; 
do dec=0 to 255;
   drop byte;
   byte=byte(dec);
   hex=put(dec,hex2.);
   anycntrl=anycntrl(byte);
   if anycntrl then output;
 end;

 proc print data=test;
 run;