Hi Chris,   It is in fact very interesting to me to know how to parse data from the internet. SAS is great at analyzing data, but you have to have the data in the first place, and the internet seems like an untapped source!    As for the blogs, it would be great if there were some sort of a table of contents of the authors' blogs like this newcomers can see what was posted before, and I personally found (and still keep searching for) a lot of valuable information! Maybe you could even post Ksharp's code on the blog in order to let readers learn about webscraping and exploring the blog contents?   Thanks!     ... View more

OK, I see now, if I don't use htmldecode function than the ' in that's will appear as '    and the reason why htmldecode wasn't used for getting the link is because in the link symbols such as ' don't appear. But to be safe, I guess that if I want to extract text then I should always use the htldecode function.   Thanks Ksharp for your guidance! ... View more

When I right click and select Inspect element I see the html code.     I think that I begin to understand. I tried to get the title in a similar way as the link: title = scan(x,6,' " ') --> but here I got "Permalink to TITLE" (becasue this entire string is between the 5th and 6th delimiter), and the length of the substring "Permalink to " is in fact 13, so by doing the substr from position 14 you get rid of that substring.   But then I did title = substr(scan(x,6,' " '),14) and got the title, so what does htmldecode exactly do? I searched on Google and the only thing that I found about htmldecode is that it decodes html text, for example it transforms &lt to <. So what is htmldecode doing in this case? You said that it translated <: into <, but I don't quite understand what this means. Could you please clarify to me?   Thanks! ... View more

Thanks Ksharp for the solution!   I just have a question - why do you use the "htmldecode" to get the title, and why do you use the substr with position # 14 if the scan(x,6,' " ') already should (theoretically) give the title?   Thanks! ... View more

Wow, thanks Ksharp for the macro! Its actually an insight to me that macro variables could be used in the "filename".   In your code you do the macro for page 1 to n. But suppsoe that you want to get all the pages but don't know how many pages there are, so is it possible to do the macro incrementally from pages 1 up to the point when a certain page doesn't exist and that's when the macro should stop? ... View more

Thanks Ksharp!  Your code gives me only the links and the titles ina neat way!   In a logic continuation of the question, is it possible to get all the links from page 1 up to the last page? ... View more

The links start and finish with quatation marks. As for the position, I thought that I had to put the number 2 because html is of the form <a ... and therefore I thought that it starts with position 2. But then I counted the position of the "h" in the "http..." and it turned out to be 8 and when I put 8 instead of 2 I did actually get the links!   But besides the links I get lines that don't contain at all the "html". Why is that so?     Thanks! ... View more

So if I understand correctly, on p.83:   num discount {year in YEARS} = 1 / (1 + &discount_rate)^(year - 1);   here we have "year" in YEARS becasue there is also "year" on the RHS, whereas for:   proc optmodel; set <str> MINES; num cost {MINES}; num extract_ub {MINES}; num quality {MINES}; read data mine_data into MINES=[mine] cost extract_ub quality;   here for the num cost, extract_ub and quality there is no "mine" in MINES becasue there is no RHS part of an equation where "mine" is specified, but here the values are just being read. ... View more

Thanks!   Strictly speaking, Shmuel's post is the answer to the question as I formulated it, but the other posts give immense insight into the general solution! ... View more

is it possible to assign a list such that:   array x{3} $ _temporary_ &list;   ... View more

Thanks for the code it works perfectly!   But suppsoe that instead of the groups 3,1,2 I had groups a,b,c - is it possible to have a more universal solution which can accomodate for any groups?   ... View more