Character Field Manipulations, Best Approach

[NKormanik]

I just finished doing some slicing-and-dicing of a character field, using SAS built-in functions.  Involved many steps and seemed a lot more complicated than I would have guessed.

Just curious, do most advanced users here graduate to another approach to character field manipulation?

I see that SAS also allows using RegEx.  Would RegEx be a better approach to many character field manipulations?

Here is an example of one manipulation I was attempting:

Have:

rg1_23456a_7

Want:

34a

Thanks much.

Nicholas Kormanik

[Reeza]

You need to show a rule and/or pattern. You can't extrapolate from a single data point.