PRX MATCH with a wild card for the middle of a string

[nketata]

Hi there,

I have a file with many text fields like the one below:

DATA A;

TEXTO="Expenditures pursuant to paragraph 21(3) of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act"; output;

run;

I am not sure however how this text is written exactly: it could be Expenditures pursuant to the Nuclear Safety and Control Act or any

other possible version.

So I am looking for a wild card inside a prxmatch command that would return this string with anything between  Expend and Act.

DATA B; SET A;

if prxmatch('/Expend (INSERT WILD CARD) Act/',TEXTO) then FLAG=1;

run;

Thanks.

[snoopy369]

There are a ton of different 'wildcard' type things in perl regular expressions, but the simplest is .*  (match any character = . , and then * means match zero or more of them).

DATA A;

TEXTO="Expenditures pursuant to paragraph 21(3) of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act"; output;

run;

DATA B; SET A;

if prxmatch('/Expend.*Act/',TEXTO) then FLAG=1;

run;