topic Re: searching words in a string without spaces in SAS Programming

searching words in a string without spaces

Ramakanthkrovi — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 23:57:33 GMT

Hi All, good morning.

Considering I have a string "WEIGHTMANAGEMENT", is it possible in SAS to extract the words "Weight", "Manage" and "Management" without me specifying what to search but SAS producing all the possible words in a string?

Thanks and Regards,

Rama

Re: searching words in a string without spaces

Astounding — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:11:01 GMT

So you also want:

man

manage

nag

age

gem

men

???

Re: searching words in a string without spaces

Ramakanthkrovi — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:12:12 GMT

Yes, but I can restrict the number of characters per word then isn't it?

Re: searching words in a string without spaces

ballardw — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:16:22 GMT

Look very closely at your list of "words" that you need to extract. This may be possible but order of processing may be important such as If I find "management" do I continue to look for "manage".

The more similar words you want to find the more complicated something like this gets. For instance if you also have to search for "MAN" or "EIGHT".

Do you know the words you want to search for or are you hoping to find a generic English (or other) language parser that could decipher:

"THISISASENTENCEWITHOUTANYSPACES". A native English speaker can probably decipher that phrase but I really would hate to try to program something to do that.

You might provide a larger number of examples and search words to work with, and to show the desired output.

Note that if want this to work with misspellings such as "WEIGHTMANAGEMNET" that is going to make this likely an order of magnitude more complicated.

SAS does have tools for more complex text processing in the SAS Text Miner module.

Re: searching words in a string without spaces

KachiM — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 03:52:23 GMT

Ram,

It is difficult to look for meaningful words in a string by SAS programming. Perhaps a built-in dictionary might be useful. However, I wonder whether you can rephrase your requirement such that you give some N number of predefined words and look for the occurrence any such word(s) within the String. You may ask for the number of words found in each of the Strings.

regards,

DataSp

Re: searching words in a string without spaces

PGStats — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 05:03:22 GMT

Google does it:

Re: searching words in a string without spaces

ballardw — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 16:12:50 GMT

@PGStats wrote:

Google does it:

And how much time and $ was spent by Google to accomplish this.

I won't mention how many times Google tries to split my actual search terms incorrectly though.