Thank you very much indeed. All three solution work smoothly and once again, your answers illustrated additional concepts I have not been familiar with. Sadly, I can "technically" only "accept" one. However, this case indeed is resolved. @34reqrweand @andreas_lds: Yes, this sadly was the issue that double quotes would induce an interpretation of % not in the way I would like it to be interpreted (no longer the wildcard in the regular expression search, but the beginning of a macro name). I store the variable names which I read from a data set in a macro such that I can, in a consecutive step, keep only those variable via a plain keep-command. Although I am afraid this is not the only (let allone most efficient) way to do so and hence does not constitute a necessity, it solves the task I have got at hand - isoltating only a subset of variables from a large date set based on their names, which, in this specific case, happen to follow a certain pattern implied by a certain structure. The trick to disentangle the whole string into two parts with concatenating them into one string via || is very parsimonious indeed. I fuhrter highly appreciate the two approaches involving the creation of new macro variables, which made me familiar with the translate-function and its workings. It seems clever and smart to let SAS resolve &l. to a number and pass it on to like after having replaced * by % such that it can handle it as a wildcard.
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