Introduction to Regular Expressions in SAS

Appendix C: POSIX Metacharacters

Throughout the book, we discussed metacharacters of all types that adhere to Perl standards (de facto standard across the industry) for implementation since they are what SAS uses. And they are all that you need when you’re running within the SAS environment. However, if you ever need to push the RegEx processing to a system outside of SAS, there is no guarantee that they will always work because not all systems use Perl syntax (mostly older systems don’t).

Note: When you are attempting this more advanced application, know the parameters of the system you are using. You might not need to change the RegEx coding.

The exact applications of the metacharacters described in this appendix are outside the scope of this ...