Quick and dirty but should get you going in the right direction:

89 data test ; 90 input var &:$200. ; 91 newvar = prxchange("s/\w*twink\w*/whatever/i",-1,var) ; 92 put newvar= ; 93 cards ;

newvar=hey everyone, here is whatever newvar=there is a whatever in my coffee newvar=whatever, whatever little star newvar=it is a teeny whatever in yer eye

\w* Match any alpha, can occur 0 or more times twink Match the word twink

/whatever/ Replacement string i Ignore case

Alan

Alan Churchill Savian "Bridging SAS and Microsoft Technologies" www.savian.net

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Beaulieu, Serge (DHW/SME) Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 7:41 AM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: regular expressions in SAS

Hi Folks,

I am a relative newbi to SAS (about 2 months of experience so far) and I have encountered a situation where it looks like I may need to use regular expressions and never having used this before - I am looking for advice.

Essentially, I had a csv file which has been successfully imported to sas. I was going to try to fix the data before importing it but have since abandoned that idea.

The data in the sas table that I wish to edit is in a column called 'drag1' of this sas table called 'avenue'. In the drag column - which is formatted as Character $75 - I need to find instances of particular text strings and replace the entire field entry with something else dependent on the string that was found.

For example I want to find every derivation of 'twinkle' or 'twi nky', '^twinkles' or 'Btwinkl' and replace it with 'whatever'

I thought of using something like:

if drag1 eq 'twinkle' or drag1 eq 'twinky' or drag1 eq 'twinkles'

(insert lots of combinations here) then do drag1 = 'whatever';end; run;

But even finding all of the combinations could take forever.

Essentially ... I want to find any occurance -like- ?twink? and replace the entire string with 'whatever'.

I have also read something in a command called 'proc sql ... like' '%twink%'. This seems like it might be close but am not sure how to imbed that into the above which I have tested and works but only on those exact values and I want to broaden the scope.

I posted this to the sas ods base reporting forum and someone suggested I come here.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Serge