About DonH

DonH · ‎12-22-2017

Authors: Don Henderson ( @DonH ) and Paul Dorfman ( @hashman ) This SAS Global Forum presentation highlights additional functionality of the SAS hash object. Soon after the advent of the SAS hash object in Version 9.0, its early adopters realized that its potential functionality is much broader than merely using its fast table look-up capability for file matching. This is because in reality, the hash object is a versatile data storage structure with a roster of standard table operations, such as create, drop, insert, delete, clear, search, retrieve, update, order, and enumerate. Since it is memory-resident and its key-access operations execute in O(1) time, it runs them as fast or faster than other canned SAS techniques, with the added bonus of not having to code around their inherent limitations. Another advantage of the hash object, compared to the methods that had existed before its implementation, is its dynamic, run-time nature and the ability to handle I/O all by itself, independently of the intrinsic statements of a DATA step or DS2 program calling its methods. The hash object operations, or their combination thereof, lend themselves to diverse SAS programming functionalities well beyond the original focus on data search and retrieval. In this paper, which may be thought of as a preview of a SAS book being written by the authors, we aim to present this logical connection using the power of example. Online resources Beyond Table Look-up: The Versatile SAS Hash Object (PDF) Sample programs and data (attached to this article) Presentation slides (attached to this article) Using the Hash Object (SAS documentation)

DonH · ‎10-11-2017

Thanks. Looks promising. I will check it out tonight. I am teaching the SQL course and one of the students asked me this question. This question came up yesterday and not being a regular EG user I mentioned that communities.sas.com was a good resource to ask such questions. Your quick reply reinforced my point about the value of this site.

DonH · ‎10-11-2017

Is it possible to define a hot-key to open a new program. It is not listed as one of the defined keys. Is it possible to define a keyboard macro to perform this action? If not, any other suggestions?

DonH · ‎03-31-2017

The flight ride in Canada is awesome. At least It was years ago when I did it. The restaurant is good too. Going to the Mexican one for dinner tonight. Will try to report back.

DonH · ‎03-22-2017

Requiring laptops to be in checked baggage may require some folks to either not attend or not bring their laptops. I know of a number of companies that have very explicit rules that laptops are never to be checked. And quite often those rules go further and state that unless the laptop is secured (e.g., with a Kensington lock) the employee has to always have it in their possession. I spent 4 years working for a company that had rules like that and they made it very clear that violating the rule was grounds for immediate termination.

DonH · ‎03-03-2017

Going to have to investigate other travel plans. Graceful/coordinated are not words commonly used to describe me

DonH · ‎01-05-2017

Thanks Shmuel, That is exactly the approach that I was considering. This is part of a large application and we have parameterized most of the checks, including the PRX checks. At the point in the process where the prxmatch function is used, I have a data set that has the values to be validated along with the pattern. So I will add logic to detect if there are accented A or accented N characters in the string to be validated. If so, I will add code to convert them to lower case a and N in both the data value and the pattern - by using temp variables. The lower case letters work for this since another part of the requirements is that only upper case characters are allows for any text/string variable. So thanks for suggesting this approach as it gives me a bit more confidence that I am going down the right path.

DonH · ‎01-05-2017

Thanks Patrick, that is what I was afraid the answer would be. And to answer Schmuel's question, ignoring them in not an option. It is only these characters, and accepting these characters is a key requirement for a large application. So I am going to look into workaround for this (have a few ideas).

DonH · ‎01-05-2017

I meant to add that I did try specifying these two accented characters in the patter in hex, e.g.,: /^[\xD1\xC3A-Z&]{3}\d{6}[A-Z0-9]{3}$/ that also failed.

DonH · ‎01-05-2017

I have PRX functions that I am using to validate strings. Here are a couple of examples: /^[A-ZÃ‘&]{3}\d{6}[A-Z0-9]{3}$/ /^[A-ZÑ‘&]{3}\d{6}[A-Z0-9]{3}$/ /^[A-ZÃÑ‘&]{3}\d{6}[A-Z0-9]{3}$/ The difference is sometimes only Ã is allowed in addtion to the upper case letters, sometimes only Ñ, and sometimes both ÃÑ. I can easily handle those variables. It appears the prxmatch function is counting the accented characters as two characters. For example, the following string" LÑL17010ZZZ fails (i.e., returns a 0) when using prxmatch. However if I change the {3} to {3,4}, it returns a 1. So my speculation is that it sees LÑL as four characters. I have run other tests and combinations that seem to confirm this speculation. So my question is whether there is a way to specify the Ã and the Ñ characters in the pattern so they are treated as a single character. And note that it is only these two accented letters that are allowed. TIA

DonH · ‎10-20-2016

I found the proc template code that allows this to work. Note however that the macro source needs to be updated to replace: ods html text = ' '; with ods tagsets.html4 text = ' '; That is the only needed change. Here is the proc template code that I got to work. Note that I freely acknowledge that I am not at all at expert in PROC TEMPLATE. This code was originally provided to me by Tech Support for a related issue. And I was able to tweak it for this example. ods path work.tmplmst(update) sashelp.tmplmst(read); proc template; edit tagsets.html4; define event text; start: trigger rowcol; trigger cell_value; finish: trigger cell_value; end; end; run;

DonH · ‎10-10-2016

Quentin's solution works. But i was thinking of another thread that was not specific to the "Please Wait" example. I worked with TS on a related issue where JavaScript written by ODS HTML TEXT= was not working. TS provided some template code so the generated tags did not include table tags. That restored the JavaScript functionality. I don't have access to that code right now as it is at a client site. But I will check with TS about it and hopefully he can post it here. By running that code and using the template it creates, I suspect the Please Wait routine will work as is.

DonH · ‎10-07-2016

A couple of questions. Are you trying to run the example from the link? If so, is that what is not working? What release of SAS are you using? The html/javascript that hides the previous messages is written using ODS HTML text= and I have seen issues with how such messages are being written by ODS in 9.4. If that is the issue, I believe there is a tech note about that. I can try to find that. I also have the proc template code that Technical Support provide that might help.

DonH · ‎05-06-2016

Thanks. For now this project is using UTF-8 encoding and we only need to support Spanish. But this is a good tip.

DonH · ‎05-05-2016

Thanks. I had already thought about that and was doing a strip of the string.

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