Pradnya Rodge <pdr24@DREXEL.EDU> wrote [in part]: > I need to take a word from a list from a text file and search for it > in a search engine. > In the example I am searching for (dummy) protein names hp1 and hp2. > . . . . > I need to take each word(like hp1, hp2....) from the text file replace > it in the URL, paste this URL in the browser and search, then do > further calculations. > Can I do this using SAS. If yes could anyone help me with this. I have > never done any programming related to the web, hence I am totally lost. > If I cannot do it using SAS, then which other language can I use to do > this. Any information in this regard would be of great help.

You *can* do this in SAS. The URL Gregg gave you is one way.

Whether you *should* do it in SAS is another question. The addition of the URL engine was really nice... But it still has no error-handling. What happens when you need to cope with no matches? What happens if you ever need to handle HTML encoding because your text 'word' has a '&' in it, or one of the other characters which work better in URLs when properly translated? And how are you going to parse the webpage which comes back?

I would rather do this in Perl and then feed the results back into SAS.

HTH, David -- David Cassell, CSC Cassell.David@epa.gov Senior computing specialist mathematical statistician