"Introduction to Regular Expressions in SAS by Matthew Windham provides a thorough and accessible introduction to the use of regular expressions in SAS. Assuming no prior knowledge, the book covers all of the essential aspects of regular expressions and provides some really wonderful examples of their use. The author anticipates many possible misunderstandings and carefully describes the fine distinctions between some similar expressions. Full instructions about how to use the expressions in SAS are provided. The book ends by tying it all together with an extended, comprehensive example. This book will be invaluable for anyone who wishes to learn and use regular expressions in SAS."

Dr. George V. Wilson
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Georgetown University

"Matthew Windham's book is perfectly timed with the explosive growth of unstructured information. The book is equally helpful for someone new to regular expressions and for experienced regex coders faced with implementing expressions within SAS for the first time. To his credit, Matthew focuses on common uses of regex within SAS and avoids rewriting another exhaustive cookbook.

The examples of regex applications found in Chapter 4 are relevant to the unstructured data problems I regularly experience and ensures that the book will be highlighted and close at hand!"

W. Gerhard Pilcher
Vice President & Senior Scientist
Elder Research, Inc.

"Using regular expressions to turn free text into structured data (or to clean up messy data) is a powerful tool in the hands of a data analyst. Introduction to Regular Expressions in SAS® does a great job of both explaining the theory and use cases, as well as providing practical examples that allow the reader to implement this in a practical way. The book is very well done, and I am going to encourage our staff to add this to their library of SAS analytical tools."

Todd Reed