noFmtError For Me

You know those little SAS options that come in super useful about once every nine months, but you can never remember the name cause you almost never need to use it? So you spend half a day pulling your hair out trying to remember what the little bugger is called and scrolling through the millions of results that the SAS online doc returns from your futile keyword search (another topic for another day).

Well, here's one that came up today:

options fmtError|nofmtError;

This tells SAS not to worry if it can't find a format that a data set variable is associated with.

I'll end up using this when someone passes me a data set they have created, but I don't have access to the formats they are using.