Data Need ( Keep = NewText ) ; Set One ;

Count = CountC( text , '.' ) ;

Do I = 1 To Count ; NewText = Scan( Text , I , '.' ) ; output ; End ;

Run ;

Toby Dunn

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning. ~John W. Gardner

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice that which we are for what we could become. ~Charles DuBois

Don't get your knickers in a knot. Nothing is solved and it just makes you walk funny. ~Kathryn Carpenter

From: Hakan ENER <hakanener99@YAHOO.COM> Reply-To: Hakan ENER <hakanener99@YAHOO.COM> To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Breaking down text by sentences and creating new observations Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:01:41 -0500

Following up on an earlier post that deals with text, I was wondering if anyone knows a way that sentences in a text variable can be broken down (by taking the period at the end of a sentence as the breaking point), and the resulting new sentences being posted as new observations? For example, imagine a two-column dataset, first column being a person's name, and the second column being a person's biography that contains 5 sentences, where a period appears at the end of each sentence (and periods do not appear elsewhere). Could these 5 sentences be broken down into one sentence each, and each sentence being associated with the same person's name in order to create a new observation, so that each individual person will now appear to have 5 observations in the dataset, with one sentence in the biography column? This is necessary as part of a more complicated task, so I know it looks like a strange thing to do, but may save a lot of hassle otherwise.

Thanks for any tips!

Hakan

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