Using SAS to format a string as a substring

I am new to SAS formats.

Say I have a string in the form of NNN.xxx where NNN is a number in the format of z3. and xxx is just some text.

E.g.

001.NUL and 002.ABC

Now can I define a format, fff, such that b = put("&NNN..&xxx.",fff.); returns only the &xxx. part?

I know we can achieve this by using b = substr("&NNN..&xxx.",5,3); but I want to have a format so that I can simply assign the format to a variable and not ha开发者_如何学Cve to create a new variable out of it.

Thanks in advance.

Probably the only way is to code your own custom character format using SAS/TOOLKIT. It will be much easier to create another variable as you do with substr().

As said, I think this can be achieved thru combination of custom defined formats along with SAS builtin character functions - i.e. CAT, CATX, CATS, CATT etc...