Leading Zeroes

Here's a situation that comes up pretty often. You receive a file that contains zip codes. It's an excel file and you need to create a SAS data set out of it, so you can do some nifty market analysis. No problem, you clickety clickety through the SAS import wizard and voila! a data set is created. However, the zip_code variable is numeric and doesn't have leading zeroes.

Even though zip codes are made up of numbers, we generally want to treat them as character data. Luckily for you it is easy to turn those numeric variables character and restore the leading zeroes.

In general you:
1) Rename your original numeric zip code variable.
2) Create a new character zip code variable.
3) Apply the z. format to the numeric value to make it character and
restore the missing leading zeroes.

Here is what it looks like in practice:

 data myData(drop= bad_zip);
   length zip_code $5;
   set someData( rename= ( zip_code = bad_zip ));
   zip_code = put( bad_zip, $z5. );
 run;

Creating Numeric Buckets

The other day I was writing some code that was needed for a report. Part of the report was to take a number (integer) and fit it into a set of "buckets" at intervals of 100, rounded up. Confused? Here's some examples of what I needed:
3 --> 100
101 --> 200
1536 --> 1600
64 --> 100


Here's the line of code I used to accomplish it:
newNumber = ( ceil( myNumber/100 ) ) * 100;

Certainly not the most cerebral code ever written, but (hopefully) worth sharing.

This type of problem (creating numeric buckets) is fairly common and I was wondering if anyone else had a different way of solving it?