Find a Substring in SAS with the FIND function

In SAS you can use the function FIND to check whether a string contains a combination of characters (or a single character). If this combination of characters is found, the FIND function returns the position of the first occurrence in the string. If the substring is not found, SAS returns a 0. The syntax of the function is the following:

FIND(string, substring)

In the example below, the FIND function checks whether a string contains the substring Ms.

data work.ds;
	input string $1-30;
	datalines;
Mr. Jones and Ms. Smith
Ms. Smith and Mr. Johnsen
Mr. Jones and Mr. Johnsen
Ms. Smith and Ms. Taylor
;
run;

data work.ds_find;
	set work.ds;
	
	string_find = find(string, 'Ms.');
run;	

By default, the FIND function is case sensitive. However, you can add a third parameter to the function to ignore the character case. So:

FIND(string, substring, ‘i’)

If you want to Find & Replace a substring, you can use the TRANWRD function.

You can find the official SAS documentation about the FIND function here.