Hello all,
I have an example data:
The column in data A includes special characters: AA*B, A**B, AB**, and here * can be anything, both letter and number.
The column in data B without special character: AADB, ABBF, AB3D.
so in this example, since AADB satisfies AA*B, AB3D satisfies AB**, they will be reported.
I do not know how to deal with them in SAS, could anyone help me to figure this out?
Thanks a lot.
Sounds a lot like what the LIKE operator can handle.
You can use LIKE in SQL queries.
If the text literally has * to represent a single character you will want to convert those to _ which is what the LIKE operator uses to match a single character.
proc sql;
create table want as
select a.*,b.xxx
from table1 A
left join table2 B
on a.column like translate(b.column,'_','*')
;
quit;
If the values in the pattern can include actual _ characters you will need to first prefix those with an escape character.
on a.column like translate(tranwrd(b.column,'_','^_),'_','*') escape '^'
If you cannot find an escape character to use that cannot appear in the pattern string then you will need to escape those also.
on a.column like translate(tranwrd(tranwrd(b.column,'^','^^'),'_','^_),'_','*') escape '^'
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