Date:         Thu, 17 Mar 2005 14:30:58 -0500
Reply-To:     "Chang Y. Chung" <chang_y_chung@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Chang Y. Chung" <chang_y_chung@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Re: What is the regular expression for SAS format name?
Comments: To: Lei Zhang <lzhang9830@YAHOO.COM>

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:13:33 -0800, Lei Zhang <lzhang9830@YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>Hi Richard and Gary,
>     Thanks a lot for your kind message. It helps me a lot!  What I
>want to do is to parse
>a SAS format statement separated by a SAS format. For example,
>
>For example:
>      "a b c 2.8  e f g $fmt. u  v w $abc12.1  a  b c A1224.123
>$char8.2"
>  will be parsed into
>         a  b c    due to 2.8
>         e  f g     due to $fmt.
>        u v w      due to $abc12.1
>       a b c A1234.123 due to $char8.2
>
>I came up with a RE as follow
>   '/\$?[_a-zA-Z]\w{0,31}\.\d{0,2}/'
>as the separator of a Format-like string, but it does not always work
>at all kinds of situations.
>
>Your advice will be very much appreciated. Thanks

Hi, LZ,

As long as your values can be a number with a decimal point, I don't think
this is possible. This is simply because there is no way of telling if the
following is a numeric format or a value:

    2.0
    1.
    5.2

Whoever requested making the "F" in front of the default numeric format
optional, did not think about it careful enough. I think this is one of the
reasons why we cannot do something like:

  data _null_;
    put 3.2;
  run;

instead we have to do:

  data _null_;
     a = 3.2;
     put a;
  run;

Simply because sas does not know what "2.3" is. Similarly the enhanced
editor is having hard time to syntax color it.

Cheers,
Chang