Extract a sentence in a string that has a word in different forms

[Bhuvaneswari]

Hello,

Hope you all had a good weekend.

This question is similar to the one I posted last week but I ned help in making the code more robust.

Could you please help in extracting sentences that had a word in several forms?

Say all sentences with different forms of word 'experience'?  like experience, ExperiEnce-based, Experienced, Experiencing and so on? Can we get the desired results using regex coding?

Here is the link to the question

https://communities.sas.com/t5/General-SAS-Programming/Extra-a-sentence-in-a-string-that-has-a-speci...

Thanks a lot, appreciate the help!

Regards,

Bhuvana

[RW9]

You can use fuzzy searching methods as described in this article:

http://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2015/01/27/how-to-perform-a-fuzzy-match-using-sas-functions/

[Astounding · Accepted solution]

It looks like you already have code to pick out one sentence at a time.  The easy way to make the code more robust would be to use the FIND function:

if find(sentence, 'experience', 'i') > 0 then ...

While you could use INDEX instead of FIND, the advantage of FIND is that you can add the "i" modifier to ignore differences in case.

[Bhuvaneswari]

Hello,

Thanks for the response, I used that but it is not picking sentences that either have hyphen like 'experince-based'.

For instance, the code below is not picking the first sentence 

data example;
comment ="The worst experience-based I've ever had with them. The worst service in a decade. Because of this experience I will not be recommending this gym." ;
length extract sentence $200.;
do i = 1 to countw(comment,'.');
sentence = scan(comment,i,'.');
if findw( sentence,'Experience',' .,/','i')>0 then do;
extract= catx(' ',extract,catt(sentence,'.')) ;

end;
end;
drop sentence i;
run;

Please advice on how to proceed further. The data I'm working on is not so well written hence I want the code to extract the words that are somewhere in the middle of the strings even if there is no space, say 'CauseExperience-Based' and so on.

Thanks a lot!

[Astounding]

Don't switch to FINDW.  Use FIND.  It will find the characters, not the word.

[Bhuvaneswari]

Switching to find() intead of findw() is returing a null string. Please advice.

[Astounding]

You'll have to show what you actually did here.  (For example, it might be that the third parameter to FIND must be removed, the way it appears in my original post.)

[Bhuvaneswari]

That worked! thanks a ton :). Can you please tell me how the find() could pick only the sentence that has the word in it without expliciply mentioning the delimiter? What if I want to change the delimiter to somthing other than period?

Thanks again for the assistance!

[Astounding]

With FIND, there are no delimiters.  It is looking for that sequence of characters anywhere in the sentence.  With a long word like "experience" that shouldn't cause any issues. 

[Bhuvaneswari]

Thanks for the help! Have a good day!