Richard,

Very neat!

The 9.1.3 documentation suggests that PRXMATCH is now "smart" enough that the expression compilation is only done once when it is passed as a constant. Do you know whether or not that alleviates the memory problems that you referred to in your earlier posting?

Mike Rhoads Westat RhoadsM1@Westat.com

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Richard A. DeVenezia Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 9:36 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: Looking for something equivalent to RTRIM

Chad Webb wrote: > My problem is that what I was told and what it true are two different > things. A policy can have multiple "alpha-numeric" 3 byte prefix > separated by a space and then followed by the 10 digit id. Examples: > 'AAP 0011223344', 'AP1 00A 1234567890' > > I first thought to use compress and remove the characters and spaces, > but I would be wrong because a prefix could have a number.

Sounds like a job for PRX. This select only computes the 'number' when the 'id' matches the regular expression describing the expected value construct.

------------------------- data foo; length id $20; input id &; cards; AAP 0011223344 AP1 00A 1234567890 AP1 00A 123456789O AP1 00A 12345678901 run;

ods listing; options nocenter;

data _null; _null=.; run;

proc sql noprint; create table two as select case when prxmatch (dual.prx, id) then substr (id,length(id)-9) else 'nonconform' end as number from foo , (select prxparse("/ \d{10}\s*$/") as prx from _null) as dual ; quit; -------------------------

See July 23, 2004 thread "How to use RXPARSE in SQL" for a similar and explanatory post.

Richard A. DeVenezia