topic Re: Wildcard Wish -- More Flexibility? in SAS Programming

Wildcard Wish -- More Flexibility?

NKormanik — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:28:23 GMT

data bigdataset;
 set wxyz_:;
run;

Super. Works great. But, what if 'wxyz' is at end of dataset name?

Curious why SAS has not added more flexibility there.

Comments greatly appreciated.

Nicholas Kormanik

Re: Wildcard Wish -- More Flexibility?

Reeza — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 01:15:44 GMT

There's easy workarounds to this issue which is why I suspect there's been no development.

proc sql no print;
select name into :data_set_list separated by " " from sashelp.vtable where name like '%_xyz';
quit;

%put &data_set_list;

If the language depends on prefixes and the data sets are designed with suffixes instead, that's bad design.

Re: Wildcard Wish -- More Flexibility?

ballardw — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 01:17:52 GMT

@NKormanik wrote:
data bigdataset;
 set wxyz_:;
run;
Super. Works great. But, what if 'wxyz' is at end of dataset name?

Curious why SAS has not added more flexibility there.

Comments greatly appreciated.

Nicholas Kormanik

Probably for the same reason that variable lists don't allow use of suffixes and likely related to really obnoxious coding. Prefixes start in the same place. But suffixes could begin at any character and coding can way more complicated.