September 2024

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In 3 steps, SAS’ Falko Schulz reveals how to use icons in SAS® Visual Analytics to illustrate percentages – without text or key values. The payoff? An infographic that pops!

Dear Reader:

What’s better than one helpful SAS tip? A whole newsletter packed with tips, of course! Scroll down and you’ll find a vast assortment of how-to’s alongside use cases, user-group news and upcoming Ask the Expert webinars. The latest Tech tips with Chris reveals three of his favorite functions to scan, locate and extract the data he’s looking for. Want a chance to win SAS swag*? Reply with an opinion on Chris’ column by 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 3 and you’ll be entered in a drawing. *The value of the swag is $5 or less, in case your employer limits what you can accept. If you win the random drawing, you’ll receive an email asking for your mailing address.

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Tech tips with Chris

3 functions for dealing with data

The SAS programming language provides myriad functions to help you scan, locate and extract the data you're looking for. I'm going to share three of my go-to functions for this, each suited for different situations:

1. The SCAN function, perfect for the situation where the data you want appears after certain other delimit characters. For example, to find the root web site address in a full URL, you could use the SCAN function to pull out the value after the second forward-slash but ends before the next forward-slash.
   
   root = scan('https://www.sas.com/workbench',2,'/');
   Result: www.sas.com
   
   root = scan('https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/ct-p/sas_programming',2,'/');
   Result: communities.sas.com
    
2. The FIND function, which is great for detecting whether a character value contains another value you're looking for. Again, my friend Ron Cody has a great example of this. Long-time SAS users may still use the INDEX function for the same purpose, but FIND is more flexible with additional options.
    
3. And finally, the PRXMATCH function, which provides a powerhouse of pattern matching using regular expressions. Regular expressions have a steep learning curve, but they are worth it for the flexibility. Pro tip: use a free web tool like Regex101 to develop your regular expression rule before implementing in your SAS program.

Tell me, what's your favorite technique for parsing unstructured text data into useful data features? Send me a note with your own best practices.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Tips & tricks

Watch updated tutorial for SAS® Viya® for Learners, now available for SAS Viya 4
Follow along as SAS’ Dominique Weatherspoon shows you how to access SAS Viya for Learners and gives a tour of the interface. She also shows you how to use SAS Visual Analytics to analyze data and create reports.

Check out Manipulating Data in Base SAS® Part 5 – Aggregate
SAS’ Mark Jordan equips you with data aggregation techniques using only base SAS. His SAS Community article even references a new SESUG 2024 paper written by David Cole of Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute.

Use SAS Content Assessment to see what’s on your SAS 9.4 environment
SAS’ Ursula Polo shows you how a free download from support.sas.com begins the migration from SAS 9 to SAS Viya.

3 ways NLP can be used to identify LLM-related private data leakage and reduce risk
As the adoption of LLMs grows, so does the risk of unintentionally exposing sensitive data through careless prompting. SAS’ Mary Osborne provides examples underscoring the need to be vigilant about how they interact with these powerful tools.

Special missing values in SAS statistical tables
SAS’ Rick Wicklin says statistical tables in SAS include special missing values to represent certain situations in statistical analyses. In a recent blog post, he explains how to interpret four special missing values that appear in SAS statistical tables.

Learn to upload Microsoft Excel tables to SAS and CAS with Microsoft 365
SAS’ Shelby Taylor, inspired by a trip to Glacier National Park, created a table of the most common animals found there.

Discover the SAS Stress Testing workflow
SAS’ Sravya Malempati introduces the tasks that help financial institutions perform regulatory and business-as-usual stress tests.

Make it rain code with PROC GANNO
SAS customer Clark Lawson shows you how to create graphics output with annotations defined by an input data set.

Myth busting: is Maine the closest US state to Africa?
It is indeed. Follow along to find out how PROC SGMAP eliminates any doubt.

Step into the Viya Verse
In a 15-minute video, SAS’ David Weik and guest Scott Leslie reveal the new Table Editing capability in SAS® Visual Analytics.

Get an introduction to incorporating GenAI models in SAS® Visual Forecasting
Learn about pretrained forecasting models and how to integrate them with SAS Visual Forecasting.

Learn how SAS® Visual Analytics can help combat illegal fishing networks
At the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge, SAS data scientists won the Honorable Mention Award for Breadth of Investigation. They used SAS Viya and related machine learning tools to the ultimate test — to identify individuals in a complex fishing network.

Find out how to "%include" code in your SAS session
Use the SAS extension for VS Code or full-on SAS Viya Workbench? Check out this new macro to add code from a SAS Notebook file in your SAS session.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Use Cases

Okeanos, Amsterdam's top rowing club, makes waves with SAS sports analytics
From heart rate tracking to power metrics, the team is revolutionizing training and talent development.

Can SAS improve a cruise vacation? Yep.
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings uses machine learning to help guests find what they need when they need it.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​User group news

SAS Certification exams at MWSUG 2024
Update your LinkedIn profile with a shiny new SAS Certification! Sit for your SAS Certification exam at MWSUG 2024 for a discounted rate of $50 (normal exam price $120-$250). We will host a proctored exam session on Sun., Nov. 17, at 1:00 p.m. You can take any of the more than 20 SAS Certification exams. This will be a “bring your own computer” event, and the exam can be taken on both Windows 10/11 laptops and MacBooks.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Upcoming learning events

(Each is one hour and complimentary.)

Why SQL Dictionary Tables are a Game-Changer for Data Scientists
Join SAS’ Charu Shankar at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., Oct. 3 to learn essential topics like identifying common keys for joins, resolving data type conflicts, and locating changed variable names.

Modernize to SAS® Viya® with HPE GreenLake High-Performance, On-Premises, Pay-As-You-Go Solution
Join SAS and HPE experts at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., Oct. 10 to learn how the HPE GreenLake Flex solution built for SAS Viya offers a proven, high-performance, on-premises pay-as-you-go solution and bring the cloud experience to where your data lives.

Fostering Trustworthy AI Using a Model Card
Join SAS’ Sophia Rowland and Vrushali Sawant at 11:00 a.m. on Thurs., Oct. 17 to learn the steps necessary to complete a model card and the benefits it offers.

How Do I Clean My Data Using SAS Programming: Part 2
Join SAS’ Jacqueline Johnson at 11:00 a.m. on Tues., Oct. 22 to explore programming tips and tricks for cleaning your data using SAS programming.

From Muggles to Macros: Transfiguring Your SAS Programs with Dynamic, Data-Driven Wizardry
Join independent consultants Josh Horstman and Richann Watson at 11:00 a.m. on Thurs., Oct. 31 to see examples of how to transform static “muggle” code – full of hardcodes and data dependencies – by adding macro language magic to create data-driven programming logic.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​For developers

Earlier this year, SAS relaunched the SAS Developer Portal developer.sas.com. We’ve just added consolidated resources on SAS Viya Workbench. On the page you’ll find links to enablement, documentation, video tutorials, GitHub resources and blog posts, all related to SAS Viya Workbench.

SAS Bowl XLIV, Model Cards
Join us for SAS Bowl Trivia! You’ll get an introduction to model cards.

• The game will be Wed., Oct. 16, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
• Register and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event.
• On game day, join the Teams meeting and access the game here.

[whymath]

Awesome article.

As for my trick of dealing data, I always use "cats()" function in data cleaning processing, due to two reasons:

1. replace "strip()" function. Although "strip()" is more efficient in removing leading and trailing spaces, I use "cats()" when I don't care about efficiency. Because "cats" is a shorter word than "strip". 

2. replace "put()" function to transform number to string. The reason is the length of expression, too, if you count the length of format.