Wildcards

[dblan]

Is there a way to write a where statement to look at only certain positions in the text of a field? Maybe a example would be best.
Something like this works:

data want;
set have;
where (phone = '5555555555' or substr(phone,4,3) = '555');
run;

The results are phone numbers that are all 5's plus the ones where the middle 3 are 5's are returned.

But I'd like to find a cleaner way. Is there a way to say something like this?

data want;
set have;
where (phone in ('5555555555','***555****');
run;

 

[kdt82]

For the example you have given I don't understand the need to specify '555555555' and not just this.

where substr(phone,4,3) = '555';

If you wanted to use wildcards in the SAS where clause

where phone like '___555____';

You can also do this in SQL, just replace underscores with percentages. For more complex patterns you could turn to prx

if prxmatch(prxparse('/\d{3}5{3}\d{4}/'),phone);

I'm not aware of being able to use wildcards with "in", but hopefully prx should suffice.