topic What is the fastest way to search text for matching value in SAS Programming

What is the fastest way to search text for matching value

napat — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:55:56 GMT

I want to search for a list of words in a long text in a column (. If any word in the list exists in the column, the row be in the output dataset.

Please see my partial code.

I want to search for dog,cat and boat in a column called "Column"

WL = PRXPARSE("/dog|cat|boat/");

do i=1 to N;

position = PRXMATCH( WL ,Column(i));
if position ge 1 then do;

ALERT_TRIGGER_TXT= SUBSTR(Column(i),max(1,position-200),position-1)|| '*' ||

SUBSTR(A_TSC_SUSP_TXT(i),max(1,position),position+200) ;
output;
end;
end;

Is there other text searching function that would make the program faster?

Re: What is the fastest way to search text for matching value

RW9 — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:50:17 GMT

I would do - without test data (form of a datastep) and required output - :

data want;
  set have;
  do i="DOG","CAT","BOAT";
    if index(upcase(<your string variable>),i) > 0 then do;
      found=1;
      leave;
    end;
  end;
run;

Re: What is the fastest way to search text for matching value

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:51:57 GMT

I guess that you will be mostly I/O bound, but you could try

%let list=dog,cat,boat;

data want;
set have;
indicator = 0;
do i = 1 to countw("&list",',');
  if indexw(column,scan("&list",i,',')) > 0 then indicator = 1;
end;
if indicator then output;
drop indicator i;
run;

just to compare runtimes.

Re: What is the fastest way to search text for matching value

data_null__ — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:55:19 GMT

You need to supply data and a complete example program.

PRXPARSE is slow and should only be done one time and retain the RC for use in PRXMATCH. See the exampes in the documentation where they use the RETAIN statement and IF _N_ eq 1 THEN ....