topic Re: How to select a date from a string conditional on a part of that string in SAS Data Management

How to select a date from a string conditional on a part of that string

ilikesas — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 02:04:04 GMT

Hi,

suppose I have the following table:

Company
ABC (merged 1/10/2012)
DEF (bankrupt 2/5/2009)
ZZZ

If the company merged, I would like to get a new column for the date when it happened, and nothing for the others, in the following way:

Company	Merged
ABC (merged 1/10/2012)	1/10/2012
DEF (bankrupt 2/5/2009)
ZZZ

Thank you

Re: How to select a date from a string conditional on a part of that string

Reeza — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 04:24:50 GMT

You're previous questions should allow you to isolate which variables have the word merged.

Adding on to that, you can use the scan function to get the date, and in conjunction with the input function convert it to a valid SAS date which is highly recommended. I'm assuming the format of the dates is mmddyy though it's unclear based on your date format.

data have;

length var $30.;

var="ABC (merged 1/10/2012)";output;

var="DEF (bankrupt 2/5/2009)";output;

var="ZZZ";output;

run;

data want;

set have;

date=scan(var, -1, "() ");

sas_date=input(scan(var, -1, "() "), mmddyy10.);

format sas_date date9.;

run;

Re: How to select a date from a string conditional on a part of that string

ilikesas — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 05:14:36 GMT

Hi Reeza,

thank you for replying and for reading my previous question!!!

I would like to ask a question, suppose I had ABC ( merged in 1/10/2012 because of reasons), when applying the scan function the "date" that I will get is "reasons" because its the last word, so is there a way of getting the date regardless of its position in the string?

Thank you

Re: How to select a date from a string conditional on a part of that string

Reeza — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 06:31:33 GMT

Any other variations? Will there be other numbers or slashes in the text?

You can look into the index/find/substr functions.

Re: How to select a date from a string conditional on a part of that string

OleSteen — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 07:11:26 GMT

I would go for Perl regular expression functions: E.g. PRXCHANGE, PRXMATCH etc.