Date:         Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:13:33 -0800
Reply-To:     lzhang9830@YAHOO.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Lei Zhang <lzhang9830@YAHOO.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: What is the regular expression for SAS format name?
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

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

LZ