Date:         Thu, 8 Nov 2007 16:04:22 -0600
Reply-To:     Yu Zhang <zhangyu05@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Yu Zhang <zhangyu05@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Regex solution needed.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi, All,

I couldn't figure out how to come up with a Regex solution for
following task. Suppose i have to find evey word which doesn't end
with 's' in a text file. What the Regex will be? especially when we
have something like 'John's ', 'Tom's'. the regex i have tried always
pick it up and match part of it, because i used the word boundary
'\b'. the apostophe is a word boundary. How to overcome it?

see example below.

Note: in this contrived example, we just hav e single word each line.
in reality, we want to search through the long line.

Does anyone can show me how to come up a correct Regex?

thanks!

Yu

data test;
  if _n_ = 1 then re = prxparse('/\b(\w*(?!=s))\b/');

  retain re;
  infile cards truncover;
  input string $20.;

pos=prxmatch(re, string);
if pos then  match = prxposn(re, 1, string);
cards;
john's
book
;
run;