topic Conditional statement with wild cards in SAS Programming

Conditional statement with wild cards

MLAC — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 03:50:34 GMT

I got errors with the following IF/Then statement.

if POSTAL_CODE like "T__" and AREA_CODE in ("368", "403", "587", "780", "825") then
	PROVINCE="AB";

ERROR 388-185: Expecting an arithmetic operator.

ERROR 202-322: The option or parameter is not recognized and will be ignored.

Does that mean I cannot use wild cards in the conditional statement? What code should I put to check if the first char of the string is 'T' ?

Re: Conditional statement with wild cards

mkeintz — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 04:24:36 GMT

The LIKE operator is not available in the DATA step, except as a WHERE condition.

But you can do something like (no pun intended):

if POSTAL_CODE =: 'T' and AREA_CODE in ("368", "403", "587", "780", "825") then PROVINCE="AB";

the =: relation take the shorter of the two expressions and sees if the other expression starts with matching characters. In this case it test whether postal_code starts with a 'T',

Re: Conditional statement with wild cards

Patrick — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 04:25:45 GMT

The LIKE operator is not valid within an IF condition. Here what you can use instead.

Re: Conditional statement with wild cards

MLAC — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 04:58:35 GMT

Thanks. That helps. But the output of the second part on that page is wrong. The output should like this:

Diana
Diane
DIANNA

Re: Conditional statement with wild cards

ballardw — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 16:11:31 GMT

@MLAC wrote:

Thanks. That helps. But the output of the second part on that page is wrong. The output should like this:

Diana
Diane
DIANNA

Example data of the input to get that output and the actual code you used.

If referring to the example link that @Patrick showed then I submit that you really show the code that you ran as that is the exact result I get with the data. Note that depending on what you did it may be that your code modified the input set because unfortunately the example code is using the

data test;
   set test;

construct repeatedly. And each one completely rewrites the set Test. So if you played around with the code for the first example, such as the

   /* the syntax to select observations that /*
   /*  do not match the pattern is below */
   *if name not =: 'D';

then you may have removed the values that are expected for the second part.