topic Re: Regular expression extracting in EG in SAS Programming

Regular expression extracting in EG

Kapir — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:31:38 GMT

Hello,

i have a colum "CODE" with data like "22A", "3z", "43 G" and so on.

Tryed to extract the characters with prxmatch('/[a-zA-Z]/',CODE). It shows me the position but i dont know, what to write in SAS EG that the new column just have the character.

Besides i need the same, just for the numbers.

So that Code are split in 2 new columns with just the characters and just the numbers.

How to archive this in SAS EG? I created 2 new calculated columns and thought with prxmatch('/[a-zA-Z]/',CODE) and prxmatch('/[0-9]/',CODE) i can archive this.

Re: Regular expression extracting in EG

PeterClemmensen — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:33:30 GMT

@Kapir Hi and welcome to the SAS Community 🙂

Is it a requirement to use PRX function?

Re: Regular expression extracting in EG

Kapir — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:38:29 GMT

Thxs draycut.

Its not. I used regexp on the DB without problems so i thought, i could do it with SAS too.

Re: Regular expression extracting in EG

PeterClemmensen — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:42:51 GMT

You can do something like this

data have;
    length string $20;
    string="22A";  output;
    string="3z";   output;
    string="43 G"; output;
run;

data want;
    set have;
    newstring=compress(string, , 'ka');
run;

Re: Regular expression extracting in EG

andreas_lds — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:59:50 GMT

The function prxmatch does exactly what its names says: it verifies that text matches an expression. If you want extract something you have to use prxchange or prxposn additionally. Fortunately the function compress - as suggested by @PeterClemmensen - can solve the issue without regex.