Hi,
I have a timeseries dataset. In it, I have a variable that contains company names. But the company names change in many observations across time. I want to match and replace the company names so that companies which are (obviously) the same have the same name in the dataset and not several different names.
Ex: XYZ,XYZ Company, XYZ & CO, XYZ CO etc. all will have one name such as for example 'XYZ Company'.
The name matching problem is addressed in chapter 81 of Professional SAS Programming Shortcuts with example code at http://www.globalstatements.com/shortcuts/81b.html. The example is based on the idea of matching two separate data sets but most of the same ideas would apply when the data is in a single data set.
In a smaller version of the problem where there are only a few hundred values, you may just want to create a table that maps each distinct character value to the canonical form of the name that you would want to see.
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