topic Re: find function in SAS Programming

find function

valleet — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 11:08:47 GMT

Dear all,

I am trying to use the use the find() function in SAS Enterprise 5.1.

It does not work as specified in all the literature I found on the web. It is only able to find perfect matches between two

strings. For instance, it return 1 on find(col1,col2) when col1 contains "CORK" and col2 "CORK", but 0 when col1 contains

"ICORK" and col2 contains "CORK".

Can someone explain why find() has the behavior ?

Thanks,

Thierry

Re: find function

Loko — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 11:15:00 GMT

Hello,

It works as explained in the documentation:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a002267763.htm

The following example returns z=2 in the log.

data _null_;
col1='ICORK';
col2='CORK';
z=find(col1,col2);

put z=;

run;

Re: find function

valleet — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 11:21:25 GMT

Here is my test code:

data testFile;
length col1 $20 col2 $20;
input col1 $ col2 $;
datalines;
ICORK CORK
CORK DUBLIN
;
run;

data testFind;
set testFile;
put col1= col2=;
test = find(col1,col2);
run;

and is find() does not find CORK in ICORK

Do you have an idea why?

Thansks,

Thierry

Re: find function

Loko — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 11:45:11 GMT

Hello,

Providing the substring (in your ex. col2) in the form of a variable means SAS adds the spaces which fill in the variable until thje length provided (in your example 20).

Adjusting the code to test = find(col1,trim(col2)); will do it .