topic How to remove characters from a text string using regular expressions in SAS Programming

How to remove characters from a text string using regular expressions

singhsahab — Mon, 31 May 2021 15:57:23 GMT

Hi All,

I'm trying identified all special char present in string expect Keyboard character.

Below is my program, which is not working for '%$' characters. Please help me how i can ignore '%$' and " as well.

DATA WANT;
STRING="AD'GADJ%$'123@~`";
Identified_Specialcharacters = prxchange('s/[a-z A-Z 0-9 .,?#()-~`!@#^&*_+={}[]|\?><:;%]//i',-1,STRING);
RUN;

Thank you in Advance !!

Re: SAS Programming

Oligolas — Mon, 31 May 2021 14:44:26 GMT

Hi,

you need to escape with backslash each of the metacharacters

{}[]()^$.|*+?\

DATA WANT;
   length regEx EscIgnoreChars $200 string $3000;
   STRING='β∞∞π';
   EscIgnoreChars=translate(trim(' { } [ ] ( ) ^ $ . | * + ? \'),'\',' ');
   regEx=cats('s/','[','\w',EscIgnoreChars,',#-~`!@&_=><:;%',']','//i');
   put regex=;
   Identified_Specialcharacters = cats('>>',prxchange(regEx,-1,STRING),'<<');
   if Identified_Specialcharacters ne '>><<' then put 'E' 'RROR:' Identified_Specialcharacters=;
RUN;

Make sure you run SAS with unicode Support to be able to display any of the special chars.

Re: SAS Programming

FreelanceReinh — Mon, 31 May 2021 15:45:53 GMT

Hi @singhsahab,

On an ASCII system you can also specify a range of hexadecimal ASCII codes:

prxchange('s/[\x20-\x7E]//',-1,STRING)

As far as I see, this range consists of all characters you want to remove plus the forward slash ('/' = '2F'x).

Re: How to remove characters from a text string using regular expressions

Reeza — Mon, 31 May 2021 15:58:55 GMT

Please try and use more descriptive subject lines.