Flag phone numer formats

[Q1983]

data have;

input Phone $15.;

datalines;

0000000000

0

1111111111

2222222222

8391134456

;

run;

I have a dataset that presents phone numbers as a character variable which is common.  If the phone number is a blank, a 0 or some other incomplete phone number I want to flag it.  So in the above example the last transaction is an actual phone number that can be called.  The others are not.  In this example I using just a few examples however the phone field could show any combination of incomplete phone numbers.  Should this be done through something like proc format or is there another way

[ed_sas_member]

Hi @Q1983,

You can use the PRXMATCH function to do this job.

This function checks whether a variable matches a specified pattern.

According to your description, I assume that the condition to be considered as a valid phone number is to have 10 digits.

If this is right, you can specify the following pattern (= look for 10 digits). Otherwise, you need to specify the rules (e.g. to have the 3 first digits in let's say 2-8, ...). For further information about this function:

https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=n0bj9p4401w3n9n1gmv6tf**bleep**9...

data want;
	set have;
	if prxmatch('/\d{10}/', Phone) then flag = 1;
	else flag = 0;
run;

Best,

[Q1983]

Thanks for the post.  If I see a number like 1111111111, 2222222222 etc, these are not valid phone number because you cannot call those numbers.  Your code does satisfy the 9 digit format requirement.  Is there a way to modify the code to address the above issue??

[Q1983]

cancel the last question, I will just redefine those affected phone numbers