Hi everyone,   I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to see if any one of several columns might contain an alphanumeric code of interest from a fairly long list. (Let's say my variables are called cause1-cause20 and death1.) The alphanumeric codes start with one letter and end with two or three numbers (e.g., X81, Y350, W19).  For the subsets I'm trying to create, I might be dealing with 50 or more different alphanumeric codes of interest.  Depending on the question being asked, the list may change, so I have to establish conditions for each subset.     For simpler situations using one variable (death1) for example, if I'm looking to see if my columns have a code in the range of W00 to W19, I approach it this way and there are no issues:   proc sql; create table injury.deaths as select &listx from injury.deathfile where death1 like 'W0%' or death1 like 'W1%'; quit; What would be an efficient approach when I have to search through several columns for instances of codes from a very long list of alphanumeric codes? Should I create macros for the list of codes? Is there a way to use wildcards or underscores in a macro?  Would I use an array and do loop and macros all at once? (I seem to get tripped up when combining things.)  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  When I have experimented with arrays in data steps, I end up with all or none of the observations, which I know is incorrect.  Thank you.   I'm using SAS x9.4.   ... View more