topic Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string in SAS Programming

How to find Repeate charachters in a string

BrahmanandaRao — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 09:49:45 GMT

data test;
x='aabbeehvvkellb';
run;

How to find repeated characters in a string

without use perl reg expression

Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 09:53:42 GMT

What do you want to do when you find a repeat? Remove the character, or just flag the observation?

Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string

PeterClemmensen — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 09:54:24 GMT

What do you want to do with repeated characters?

Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string

BrahmanandaRao — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 10:09:53 GMT

Hi Draycut

Its is interview question

Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 10:16:27 GMT

That does not answer our questions.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO WHEN YOU FIND A REPEAT?

@BrahmanandaRao wrote:

Hi Draycut

Its is interview question

Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string

Ksharp — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 11:21:50 GMT

You could use COUNTC() .

n=countc(x,'a');

if n >=2 then there are repeated 'A' .

Re: How to find Repeate charachters in a string

ballardw — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:38:10 GMT

@BrahmanandaRao wrote:

Hi Draycut

Its is interview question

In which I case I would say that the response would involve finding out from the questioner the purpose and explicit definition of "repeated characters" would be.

Consider if the purpose is to identify an explicit repeated series of characters such as "abc" in the string "123abc34abc".

Or a specific single character like "a" that could occur in "aa123aaa456aa9a". What would the rule be for what to do? Count that 'a' occurred 8 totals times in the string, 7 times as part of sequences of 2 or more character or that it appeared in 3 sequences of 2 or more. Or just set a flag that something repeated?

Or are some or all of the repeated characters to be replaced? Moved into new/other variables ?

Different approaches to "finding" might be indicated for different actions to be taken on a string. If I need to manipulate a string then I need to rules so I know information I need to keep (likely temporary but still)