Hi, I'd like to use "wildcards" in an if/then statement, and am wondering if I'm correct in thinking the "%" sign is the wildcard for any character (including numbers that are "type"-ed as "character" and not "numeric" entries). In particular, I'm trying to do the following. I have a dataset A, that looks something like this: patient blah other variables Joe aaaa21xy ..... Bob aaaa34zq ..... Tom rsbq76zv ..... From which I want to create a dataset B, containing all patients for which the "blah" variable begins with the characters "aaaa" (and can have any characters after this). In othe words, dataset B would looks like this: patient blah other variables Joe aaaa21xy ..... Bob aaaa34zq ..... I tried & failed to do this with the following if/then statement: data datasetB; set datasetA; if blah='aaaa%%%%' then output; run; I've also tried to use "____" or ":", instead of the "%%%%", and these didn't work either (outputs are all empty datasets). Thanks in advance for your help!
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