topic Re: regular expression for beginning of a string in SAS Programming

regular expression for beginning of a string

gzr2mz39 — Thu, 15 May 2014 19:17:04 GMT

This seems to work for finding strings with numbers at the beginning.
However, I'm not sure how to add in the requirement that string may also begin with the letter A.

Does anyone know how to add this requirement to the regular expression below?

fnd=prxmatch('/^\d\/',Test_Result_Number)

So, I want to find 102, 9B101, A101, but I don't want Z10.

Thank you.

Re: regular expression for beginning of a string

PGStats — Thu, 15 May 2014 19:47:42 GMT

fnd=prxmatch('/^A?\d\/',Test_Result_Number) : A? matches the letter A 0 or 1 time. - PG

Re: regular expression for beginning of a string

gzr2mz39 — Thu, 15 May 2014 20:56:45 GMT

Hi PG,

Do you know how resolve this error?

ERROR: Closing delimiter "/" not found after regular expression "/^A?\d\/".

ERROR: The regular expression passed to the function PRXMATCH contains a syntax error.

Thank you.

Re: regular expression for beginning of a string

PGStats — Thu, 15 May 2014 21:07:30 GMT

The problem is the extra '\', it acts as an escape character. The pattern should be

fnd=prxmatch('/^A?\d/',Test_Result_Number)

I hadn't noticed.