This feature relies on the SAS
PRXPARSE
function, which uses metacharacters in constructing a Perl regular expression. This expression is applied to the whole filename including the extension. A few of the most common uses are given below.
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•
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Single alphanumeric string. The filter “
dat
” (without the quotation marks) would show all
.dat
files but also
.sas7bdat
files or any filename that contains “
dat
”.
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•
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Single file extension. To display
.dat
files only, you can specify “
\.dat
” (without the quotation marks). Note the backslash (
\
) preceding the period. The period normally is interpreted as a
metacharacter
, which matches any single character, so the backlash overrides the normal use of the period metacharacter and instead forces interpretation of the literal period.
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•
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Multiple file extensions. To display files with
.txt
,
.dat
, or
.abc
extensions only, specify “
\.txt|\.dat|\.abc
” (without the quotation marks). Note the use of the
vertical bar
(
|
) as an OR
operator
.
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•
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Specific file base and extension. To display any
.txt
file starting with the word “
test
” in its base (such as
test001.txt
,
test002.txt
,
testnnn.txt
), specify “
^test*\.txt
” (without the quotation marks). Note the use of the caret (
^
) to indicate that matches should be made at the beginning of the filename (this avoids displaying a file such as
firsttest001.txt
).
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The examples above only touch the surface of what is possible using the powerful regular expression syntax. Refer to the
SAS Online Documentation for the PRXPARSE function
for additional details.
