BookmarkSubscribeRSS Feed
napat
SAS Employee

I want to search for a list of words in a long text in a column (. If any word in the list exists in the column, the row be in the output dataset.

 

Please see my partial code. 

I want to search for dog,cat and boat in a column called "Column"

 

 

 

WL = PRXPARSE("/dog|cat|boat/");

do i=1 to N;

    position = PRXMATCH( WL ,Column(i));
    if position ge 1 then do;

           ALERT_TRIGGER_TXT= SUBSTR(Column(i),max(1,position-200),position-1)|| '*' ||                          

          SUBSTR(A_TSC_SUSP_TXT(i),max(1,position),position+200) ;
          output;
    end;
end;

 

Is there other text searching function that would make the program faster? 

 

3 REPLIES 3
RW9
Diamond | Level 26 RW9
Diamond | Level 26

I would do - without test data (form of a datastep) and required output - :

data want;
  set have;
  do i="DOG","CAT","BOAT";
    if index(upcase(<your string variable>),i) > 0 then do;
      found=1;
      leave;
    end;
  end;
run;
Kurt_Bremser
Super User

I guess that you will be mostly I/O bound, but you could try

 

%let list=dog,cat,boat;

data want;
set have;
indicator = 0;
do i = 1 to countw("&list",',');
  if indexw(column,scan("&list",i,',')) > 0 then indicator = 1;
end;
if indicator then output;
drop indicator i;
run;

just to compare runtimes.

data_null__
Jade | Level 19

You need to supply data and a complete example program.

 

PRXPARSE is slow and should only be done one time and retain the RC for use in PRXMATCH.  See the exampes in the documentation where they use the RETAIN statement and IF _N_ eq 1 THEN ....

hackathon24-white-horiz.png

2025 SAS Hackathon: There is still time!

Good news: We've extended SAS Hackathon registration until Sept. 12, so you still have time to be part of our biggest event yet – our five-year anniversary!

Register Now

How to Concatenate Values

Learn how use the CAT functions in SAS to join values from multiple variables into a single value.

Find more tutorials on the SAS Users YouTube channel.

SAS Training: Just a Click Away

 Ready to level-up your skills? Choose your own adventure.

Browse our catalog!

Discussion stats
  • 3 replies
  • 2239 views
  • 0 likes
  • 4 in conversation