201412CARD1 isn't a variable name, it's a table name. Every single table is created as a new version of a previous dataset and these versions are presented as dates like 201412. Im other words, I have many different dataset: - customerdata - products - etc. And each of these dataset have different versions, so I he sth like: - 201411customerdata - 201412customerdata - products201309 - etc. I also have a list of these tables with variables that are associated with them but the names of these tables are written like: - YYYYMMcustomerdata - productsYYYYMM So it's a template name that shows that each tables needs to have a version. And what I want to do is to check whether some variables were added, deleted or maybe the strucute itself wasn't even affected when making a change. My way of doing that was to make a dataset that would list each version and it's variables in a similiar way to the list of templates I was writing about above. After that the comparison itself didn't seem like a problem and as I said before, comparing the structure isn't really what I have problem with. The main issue is that in odrder for this to work I need to join this two dataset (one with table templates and the other one with actual tables) and it's not that straightforward because the names are different. I thought of joinig them on table names using substr but since I have lots of possibilities to cover it makes my code look terribly. Maybe there's a way to treat these version templates as numbers? Or maybe there's a smart way to create a join?
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