Date:         Mon, 6 Oct 2003 14:43:12 -0400
Reply-To:     Nathaniel_Wooding@DOM.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Nat Wooding <Nathaniel_Wooding@DOM.COM>
Subject:      Suggested enhancements to the SAS text editor
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

The recent thread on text editors (which I have not had time to read
completely)  and especially ISPF reminded me that at NESUG, I asked about
some possible enhancements and was asked to poll the list to see if how
much interest there is.

In particular, I would like to see the exclude and find all functions. For
those who did not see these discussed, the exclude function lets one
minimize blocks of text or the entire body of text. Then, when one does a
find all command for a text string, the lines containing those strings will
appear.

Andrew Farrar just mentioned some string commands that can be very helpful

'from' strings:
=       any character
@       alphabetic
#       numeric
$,£     special characters e.g ,.!@#$%^&*()
¬       non-blank
.       invalid
-       non-numeric
<       lower-case alphabetic
>       upper-case alphabetic

'to' strings:
=       any character
<       lower-case alphabetic
>       upper-case alphabetic

Examples:

c p'.' x'00'            Change all invalids to hex x'00'
c p'###' 100            Change next 3 digit number to 100
c all 73 80 p'=' " "    Blank out everything in cols 73-80
c all p'-' 1 10 "0"     Change all non-numeric chars to '0' in cols 1-10
c p'<' p'¬'             Change next upper-case char to '¬'. '¬' has no
special meaning in 'to' string.



 I, for one, would also very much like to have the ability to display text
in hex format.

If you are interested in seeing these features added to the SAS, editor,
please reply and I will try to compile the responses and forward them SAS.

I suggest that we refer to the functions as

1) text excluding

2) hex display

3) string manipulation using pictures (this is what I quote above from
Andrew Farrar's note)


Nat Wooding