SAS locate country from the address string? - sas

Question

I have a list of customer addresses in a dataset where I am trying to locate the Country of residence, for example: NEWSOUTHWALESAUSTRALIA could be indexed to report the country as Australia. I am trying to use the do loop approach to scan through the list of 252 Countries to relate the Country of residence from a dataset called address_format
The dataset test has the list of 252 Countries which have upcased & compressed, as has the field concat_address, so should no issues with differences in the text.
%macro counter;
%do ii = 1 %to 252;
data test;
set country_data (obs=&ii.);
call symput('New_upcase_country',trim(New_upcase_country));
country_new = compress(trim(country_two));
call symput('country_new',trim(country_new));
run;
data ADDRESS_FORMAT_NEW;
set ADDRESS_FORMAT;
length success $70.;
format success $70.;
if index(concat_address,"&country_new.") ge 1
then do ;
country="&country_new.";
end;
run;
%end;
%mend;
%counter;
For some odd reason If I manually programme if index(concat_address,'AUSTRALIA'), I get results, but inside the macro the results are blank.
Is there something obvious I am missing that is preventing the success of the country index?

Answer 1

The obs= option can be thought of as lastobs= (there is no lastobs option).
The option for skipping the first n-1 observations is firstobs=
This example will yield 4 rows (8-5+1)
data class;
set sashelp.class (firstobs=5 obs=8);
run;
So you want
firstobs=&ii obs=&ii, or
firstobs=&ii and a STOP;RUN; to prevent going to row &ii+1 and beyond.
Despite the above answer, I would recommend switching to a no macro approach that does all 252 checks in one data step (versus one step per check). There are numerous ways of doing such, here is one way that does not use arrays or hashes
For example:
data have;
input;
text = _infile_;
datalines;
BONGOBONGOAUSTRALIA
SOMEWHERE IN CHINA
CANADA USA
TIBET LANE, NORWAY
run;
data countries;
length name $50;
input;
name = _infile_;
datalines;
AUSTRALIA
GERMANY
UNITED STATES
TIBET
NORWAY
run;
Output only first match. An important code feature is using point= and nobs= options on the set statement inside the do loop.
data want;
set have;
do index = 1 to check_count until (found);
set countries point=index nobs=check_count;
found = index(text,trim(name));
if found then matched_country = name;
end;
run;
Output all matches
data want (keep=text matched_country);
set have;
do index = 1 to check_count;
set countries point=index nobs=check_count;
found = index(text,trim(name));
if found then do;
found_count = sum(found_count,1);
matched_country = name;
output;
end;
end;
if not found_count > 0 then do;
matched_country = '** NO MATCH **';
output;
end;
run;