Hi Patrick, thank you for your code, I ran it and obtained what I wanted. I would like to ask you something else if I may: If a given company was delisted, how to create another column which will contain the date when the company was delisted? Thank you ... View more

Hi Xia Keshan, Thank you for the code, I did it and it worked. I was just wandering, in your code the prxmatch is looking for parentheses, but if I do have for some company parentheses like this: CompABC (public 2007) Then found will be 1 for this as well, so what I did is the following: if prxmatch("/delisted /",company) then found=1;else found=0; I ran the code on a small sample and it seems to be working. Thank you and a happy new year! ... View more

Thanks xia keshan, I wish I could put more than one correct answer!! ... View more

Hi, I did an inner join and after 10 minutes got 1.2 million rows. I had many duplicates from the missing entries of both tables, because when I dropped these duplicates I was left with only 8k rows! I guess that when I was doing a left join my computer was calculating even more rows and at some point probably got stuck... Thank you for your help!!! ... View more

Hi, here included is my actual code: PROC IMPORT OUT= bs8             DATAFILE= " K:\FilesFormatted\bs8.xlsx"             DBMS= EXCEL REPLACE;     sheet = "Sheet1";      GETNAMES=YES;      MIXED=NO;      SCANTEXT=YES;      USEDATE=YES;      SCANTIME=YES;       RUN; data bs8; set bs8; format date2 ddmmyy10. ; run; PROC IMPORT OUT= sdc             DATAFILE= " K:\FilesFormatted\new sdc.xlsx"             DBMS= EXCEL REPLACE;     sheet = "Sheet1";      GETNAMES=YES;      MIXED=NO;      SCANTEXT=YES;      USEDATE=YES;      SCANTIME=YES;        RUN; data sdc; set sdc; format date_an ddmmyy10. ; format date_ef ddmmyy10. ; run; /*the merging by closest date code*/ proc sql;   create table sdc2 as     select *       from sdc a         left join           bs8 b             on a.acq_ticker=b.ticker1               where b.date2 <= a.date_an                 group by a.date_an,a.acq_ticker                   having abs(a.date_an-b.date2)=min(abs(a.date_an-b.date2))                     order by a.acq_ticker, b.date2 descending   ; quit; ... View more

Hi, I applied Dr Tabachneck's and Hai.kuo's  code to my real data which is 2 tables one having 76 000 rows and the other having 22 000 rows and my computer has been thinking for 3 hours already, is it normal? Thank you ... View more

Worked!!! Thank a lot!! ... View more

And what if the parentheses are in the middle of the entry, like: ABC (fjfj fjfj l ) DEF and the result that we want to get if ABC DEF ? Does the code for this require 2 scans and a concatenation? Thank you ... View more

Thanks Dr for the quick reply, it worked perfectly!!! I guess that the meaning of the code is that it deletes for a given entry everything after and including the first ( and returns the entry in its new form ... View more

Thanks a lot to all, now I have a lot to choose from!!! ... View more