Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

A few more SAS functions to know

22nd January 2010

There are whole pile of SAS functions for testing text strings that hadn’t come to my attention until this week. Until then, I’d have gone about using functions like INDEX and PRXMATCH functions for the same sort of ends but it’s never any load to have a few different ways of doing things and to use the right one for the job. Here’s a quick list of my recent discoveries:

ANYALNUM: First position of any alphanumeric character, returns 0 if absent

ANYALPHA: First position of any alphabetic character (letter of the alphabet), returns 0 if absent

ANYCNTRL: First position of any control character, returns 0 if absent

ANYDIGIT: First position of any numeric character, returns 0 if absent

ANYFIRST: First position of any character that can be used as the start of a SAS variable name when VALIDVARNAME is set to V7, returns 0 if absent

ANYGRAPH: First position of any printable character that isn’t white space, returns 0 if absent

ANYLOWER: First position of any lowercase letter, returns 0 if absent

ANYNAME: First position of any character that can be used in a SAS variable name when VALIDVARNAME is set to V7, returns 0 if absent

ANYPRINT: First position of any printable character, returns 0 if absent

ANYPUNCT: First position of any punctuation character, returns 0 if absent

ANYSPACE: First position of any whitespace character (tabs, carriage returns and the like), returns 0 if absent

ANYUPPER: First position of any uppercase letter, returns 0 if absent

ANYXDIGIT: First position of any hexadecimal character, returns 0 if absent

NOTALNUM: First position of any non-alphanumeric character, returns 0 if absent

NOTALPHA: First position of any non-alphabetic character, returns 0 if absent

NOTCNTRL: First position of anything that isn’t a control character, returns 0 if absent

NOTDIGIT: First position of any non-numeric character, returns 0 if absent

NOTFIRST: First position of any character that cannot be used as the start of a SAS variable name when VALIDVARNAME is set to V7, returns 0 if absent

NOTGRAPH: First position of anything that isn’t a printable character that isn’t white space, returns 0 if absent

NOTLOWER: First position of anything that isn’t a lowercase letter, returns 0 if absent

NOTNAME: First position of any character that cannot be used in a SAS variable name when VALIDVARNAME is set to V7, returns 0 if absent

NOTPRINT: First position of any non-printable character, returns 0 if absent

NOTPUNCT: First position of anything that isn’t a punctuation character, returns 0 if absent

NOTSPACE: First position of anything that isn’t a whitespace character, returns 0 if absent

NOTUPPER: First position of anything that isn’t an uppercase letter, returns 0 if absent

NOTXDIGIT: First position of anything that isn’t a hexadecimal character, returns 0 if absent

Apart from simpler cases where other techniques would work well with the a similar amount of effort, there are others that would need some investigation if you were program them without using one of the above functions. For that reason, I’ll be keeping them in mind for when I might meet one of those more complex scenarios.

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