topic find variable names that contains special symbols in SAS Programming

find variable names that contains special symbols

laiguanyu001 — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 14:12:07 GMT

Hi,

I want to check if all my variable names in my data set contains nothing other than alphabetic letters, numbers, or underscore. I've tried

select * from dictionary.columns where libname = mylib

and memname = mydata and name not like "%[0-9][A-Z][_]%";

So ideally if there exists a variable name that has a special letter, proc sql step will return that variable name. But I don't think I'm using the wildcard operation correctly.

Please help!!

Re: find variable names that contains special symbols

PaigeMiller — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 14:36:51 GMT

Example using the FINDC function


data want;
       input word $16.;
       invalid_char_position=findc(trim(word),'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_','idk');
cards;
abc_def
abC_Def7_e
7eiw
_6^78
;

Or, slightly less typing

    invalid_char_position=findc(trim(word),'','nk');