topic Re: Is there an ORACLE/SQL equivalent to the SAS SCAN command? in SAS Programming

Is there an ORACLE/SQL equivalent to the SAS SCAN command?

PaigeMiller — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 12:53:03 GMT

I am using SAS PROC SQL to extract data from an ORACLE data base. I believe that I need to find an ORACLE equivalent to the SAS SCAN command, since the SAS SCAN command doesn't work in the part of the code which is transferred to and executed in the ORACLE database.

For example, if the variable named ID has a value of

abc_de_fghijk

then in a SAS data step the command str=scan(id,2,'_'); will extract the text string 'de' from ID.

Is there an equivalent command that I can use in ORACLE? THanks!

Re: Is there an ORACLE/SQL equivalent to the SAS SCAN command?

Quentin — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:06:42 GMT

I haven't tried it, but looks like you may need to combine INSTR() or CHARINDEX() to look up the position of the ith underscore, with SUBSTRING().

Re: Is there an ORACLE/SQL equivalent to the SAS SCAN command?

RW9 — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:20:45 GMT

You could have a look at:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B12037_01/server.101/b10759/functions116.htm

The regexp_substr() function seems to be a good fit.