topic Re: Flag phone numer formats in SAS Programming

Flag phone numer formats

Q1983 — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 18:32:42 GMT

data have;

input Phone $15.;

datalines;

0000000000

1111111111

2222222222

8391134456

;

run;

I have a dataset that presents phone numbers as a character variable which is common. If the phone number is a blank, a 0 or some other incomplete phone number I want to flag it. So in the above example the last transaction is an actual phone number that can be called. The others are not. In this example I using just a few examples however the phone field could show any combination of incomplete phone numbers. Should this be done through something like proc format or is there another way

Re: Flag phone numer formats

ed_sas_member — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 19:10:46 GMT

Hi @Q1983,

You can use the PRXMATCH function to do this job.

This function checks whether a variable matches a specified pattern.

According to your description, I assume that the condition to be considered as a valid phone number is to have 10 digits.

If this is right, you can specify the following pattern (= look for 10 digits). Otherwise, you need to specify the rules (e.g. to have the 3 first digits in let's say 2-8, ...). For further information about this function:

https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=n0bj9p4401w3n9n1gmv6tf**bleep**9m.htm&docsetVersion=9.4&locale=en

data want;
	set have;
	if prxmatch('/\d{10}/', Phone) then flag = 1;
	else flag = 0;
run;

Best,

Re: Flag phone numer formats

Q1983 — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 20:57:10 GMT

Thanks for the post. If I see a number like 1111111111, 2222222222 etc, these are not valid phone number because you cannot call those numbers. Your code does satisfy the 9 digit format requirement. Is there a way to modify the code to address the above issue??

Re: Flag phone numer formats

Q1983 — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 22:11:25 GMT

cancel the last question, I will just redefine those affected phone numbers