topic Re: Check word present in a macro variable? in SAS Programming

Check word present in a macro variable?

Ram_SAS — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 01:09:16 GMT

Hi,

I have a long macro variable (check) and need to scan the presence of a word using a macro and in a data step ? How can I do that?

%let check=This is Year 2017, Month 12, Day 12;

data a;
var= "Month";
run;

Re: Check word present in a macro variable?

novinosrin — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 02:01:48 GMT

Can you please elaborate the task that you want to accomplish?

Re: Check word present in a macro variable?

Astounding — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 03:16:29 GMT

The safest tool is probably the FINDW function:

%let check=This is Year 2017, Month 12, Day 12;

data test;

var="Month";

if findw("&check", var) > 0 then flag=1;

else flag=0;

run;

You might want to consider whether upper vs. lower case matters:

if findw(upcase("&check"), upcase(var)) > 0 then flag=1;

Re: Check word present in a macro variable?

Ram_SAS — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 04:01:01 GMT

Thanks for your reply. I should have posted bit more clearly. How do we flag here? Need to get the third one flagged.

%let string=MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 0,MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 2,MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 3,MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 3,MONTH 5-ABC MONTH 6;
%put &=string;

data test;
length var $100;
var="MONTH"; output;
var="MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 1"; output;
var="MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 2"; output;
var="MONTH 1-ABC MONTH 8"; output;
run;

data test;
set test;
if findw("&string", var) > 0 then flag=1;
else flag=0;

run;

Re: Check word present in a macro variable?

Astounding — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 12:28:16 GMT

A slight change accomplishes this:

if findw("&string", trim(var), ',') > 0 then flag=1;

This change tells the function to use commas as the only delimiters. Note that this fails if the original macro variable contains blanks after the commas.

Re: Check word present in a macro variable?

Ram_SAS — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 16:27:27 GMT

Excellent, Thanks.