I would recommend you look into Help Document for the FINDC function. I think it would be more suitable to what you want to do. Hope this helps, Ahmed ... View more

Hi vxhong17, I would recommend doing the following: 1. Find out how much memory is allocate to your SAS session ----> proc options group=memory; run; 2. Specify higher internal hash table size, by specifying higher hashexp: value. Check the online help below hashexp: n The hash object's internal table size, where the size of the hash table is 2 n . The value of HASHEXP is used as a power-of-two exponent to create the hash table size. For example, a value of 4 for HASHEXP equates to a hash table size of 2 4 , or 16. The maximum value for HASHEXP is 20. The hash table size is not equal to the number of items that can be stored. Imagine the hash table as an array of 'buckets.' A hash table size of 16 would have 16 'buckets.' Each bucket can hold an infinite number of items. The efficiency of the hash table lies in the ability of the hashing function to map items to and retrieve items from the buckets. You should specify the hash table size relative to the amount of data in the hash object in order to maximize the efficiency of the hash object lookup routines. Try different HASHEXP values until you get the best result. For example, if the hash object contains one million items, a hash table size of 16 (HASHEXP = 4) would work, but not very efficiently. A hash table size of 512 or 1024 (HASHEXP = 9 or 10) would result in the best performance. Default: 8, which equates to a hash table size of 2 8 or 256 ... View more

Fred, Then Add a condition to test for 'EX' as a starting two chars, if true then leave as is, otherwise use the translate function! Ahmed ... View more

Fred, If you were only interested in replace characters with numbers, then modify the translate function clause by adding additional value substitution for E and X. data orig_mod;     Set orig;     length empCode_n 8;     empCode_n = input(translate(empCode,'1','A','3','P','2','N','<some number>','E','<some number>','X'),best.); run; If you want to replace the entire value from  EX77777 to 1566545, then I would recommend using the format approach, as suggested by Amir. Ahmed ... View more