topic Re: Perl Regular Expressions in SAS Programming

Perl Regular Expressions

barryG — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 14:34:03 GMT

Hi all,

I just came across this page documenting Perl regular expressions for Dataflux. Do the data step Perl RegEx functions have the same level of capability? I tried using \h for horizontal white space once, but it didn't work.

https://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/dfdmstudio/2.6/dmpdmsug/Content/DMCust_RegexLibUse.html

Thanks

Barry

Re: Perl Regular Expressions

ChrisNZ — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 21:19:59 GMT

It works for me.

data T; D=prxmatch('/\t/','2009'x); putlog D=; run;

D=2

Re: Perl Regular Expressions

ChrisNZ — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 22:07:23 GMT

Oh sorry. You use \h.

Yes, unsupported in SAS.

You can use: \x09 \t \s [[:blank:]]

The latter is equivalent to \h

Re: Perl Regular Expressions

barryG — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 21:37:06 GMT

Thanks, Oh well.

Looks like you can use \v for vertical white space. It would have been nice
to have the whole set available in Dataflux available in the data step, too.

Re: Perl Regular Expressions

ChrisNZ — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 22:13:23 GMT

Yes more consistency would be nice. And easy to do.

And not only here.

Re: Perl Regular Expressions

barryG — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 10:51:06 GMT

Isn't that truncation a feature of the SAS functions in the data step, too?
I'm not sure what the ANSI standard is, but I'm pretty sure SAS options
like length=, format=, label= are SAS extensions, not part of the standard.

More valuable to me would be if Proc SQL would honor length specifications
on numeric variables in Create Table;