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regexreplacesasenterprise-guide

Using REGEX to create duplicates in find / replace window of an

I have a string of words separated by tabs.

lets say I want to surround each word with brackets and add "sum"

so I use the find/replace function to replace \t with )\t, sum(.

so from

A B C D E

I get

sum(A), sum(B), sum(C), sum(D), sum(E)

But what if I want to duplicate the words.

i.e.

go from:

A B C D E

to

sum(A) as A, sum(B) as B, sum(C) as C, sum(D) as D, sum(E) as E ?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/substitutions-in-regular-expressions

didn't work.

The environment in question is SAS EG 7.1

Solution

  • If you cannot figure out how to make the editor generate code for you why not create a macro to do it for you in the code you submit to SAS?

    Your example would translate into a macro like this:

    %macro sumlist(varlist);
%local i word sep;
%do i=1 %to %sysfunc(countw(&varlist));
  %let word=%scan(&varlist,&i);
&sep.sum(&word) as &word
  %let sep=,;
%end;
%mend sumlist;

    Which you could then call in your program to generate part of an SQL statement.

    proc sql ;
create table want as 
  select %sumlist(a b c d e)
  from have 
;
quit;

    Then if you really need your editor to help you create the code you are only talking about adding a constant prefix %sumlist( and suffix ) around the selected list of variable names.