SAS Function Friday

In an attempt to increase my blog posting rate I will be highlighting a SAS function every (hopefully) Friday. At least ever Friday that I have access to a computer.

There's so many SAS functions, where do we start? Do we go for one of the more obscure ones in order to start things off with a little razzle dazzle? Something like CALL PEEK or CALL POKE. Cause it's always useful to know the address of your SAS variable. Actually, it can be very useful, just not very often. How about something a little more pedestrian?

Everybody knows all about the COMPRESS() function, right? It's not very razzle dazzle but it's darn useful. Compress() can be used to get rid of......
specific CHARACTERS in a character string!

Notice I did not say spaces. Although, a lot of times it's used just to get rid of spaces. That's the default for the optional second parameter.

data _null_;
   x = 'get rid of spaces';
   x = compress( x );

    y = 'get_rid of spaces_and_ underscores';
    y = compress( y, ' _' );
    put x = ;
   put y = ;
run;

One question you should always have when approaching a SAS character function is what is the length of the return value? In other words, if you create a new variable, what is it's length going to be?

data _null_;
    x = "Woohoo! It's Friday!";
    y = compress( x );
run;

What is the length of y? Eight (the "default" for a SAS variable)? Eighteen (the length of Woohoo!It'sFriday with the spaces comressed out)? Twenty (the length of the variable x)?

Of course you knew the answer is 20. Woohoo! smart reader.

Nifty Informat

What do you do if you are reading a date from a file and the owner of the file suddenly decides to change the format of the date?

Use the new anydtdte. informat.

From the SAS documentation:
Reads and extracts date values from DATE, DATETIME, DDMMYY, JULIAN, MMDDYY, MONYY, TIME, YYMMDD, or YYQ informat values


Nice.

A New SAS Blog To Check Out

It used to be that you could not find many resources for SAS on the web. Except for SAS-L and the odd university stuff, there just wasn't much out there. Thankfully, that's changing. For the SAS novice there is now more SAS related material on-line than ever before. Here's a new SAS blog that's aimed at spreading some SAS knowledge. Take a moment and check it out. And maybe even show some support with a comment or two. . . :)

SAS programming from scratch - by STANSI