topic Re: Correcting Misspelled Words In A Data Set in SAS Programming

Correcting Misspelled Words In A Data Set

Fistful_Dollars — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 14:13:01 GMT

I have a lookup table of manufacturer name. I have a second table of misspelled manufacturer names. How can I get the misspelled words corrected in a new, third table showing the before and after using SAS code? My Data set has thousands of distinct misspelled words.

Lookup Table:

Samsung

Sony

Nokia

Dell

Apple

Misspelled Names Table:

Samesung

Soni

Nokya

Doll

Apele

Re: Correcting Misspelled Words In A Data Set

RW9 — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 14:36:04 GMT

Well, you could use soundex:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000245948.htm

https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2015/01/27/how-to-perform-a-fuzzy-match-using-sas-functions/

Problem is what happens if one of your mispelt ones is actually another name, or exactly between the two. Its really a data capture issue, if a pre-defined list of companies was to be used then it should have been a select from dropdown rather than free text, free text is always an issue.

Re: Correcting Misspelled Words In A Data Set

Fistful_Dollars — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 15:56:28 GMT

Thanks, RW9. The code from that blog page helped. Not super accurate, but like you say that's the issue with free-form text and no drop-down.

Re: Correcting Misspelled Words In A Data Set

ballardw — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 17:02:17 GMT

If it makes you feel any better I've had to clean up such. One project where had an expected list of company names to be common answers we provided the data collection people with what should be entered. I had 18 spellings for what should have been IBM. The most entertaining of which was I>B>M>

Re: Correcting Misspelled Words In A Data Set

Reeza — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 19:33:46 GMT

You can check if your company has DataFlux. It's designed for exactly this type of matching.

@Fistful_Dollars wrote:

I have a lookup table of manufacturer name. I have a second table of misspelled manufacturer names. How can I get the misspelled words corrected in a new, third table showing the before and after using SAS code? My Data set has thousands of distinct misspelled words.

Lookup Table:

Samsung

Sony

Nokia

Dell

Apple

HP

Misspelled Names Table:

Samesung

Soni

Nokya

Doll

Apele

HC