topic Re: How to format negative numbers? in SAS Data Management

How to format negative numbers?

JinboZhao — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 08:10:40 GMT

Hi,

I have a dataset like the following. I would like to format all those numeric values to no decimals. Like -8 -4 4 for the first line. But after I used the Proc Format, all the negative numbers are missing. Could you help me?

char1 char2 char3
-8.00000 -4 4.00
-8.00000 -4 14.00
6.00000 8 4.00
-1.00000 3 4.00
6.00000 3 14.00
6.00000 0 4.00
6.00000 0 4.00
11.00000 3 4.00

Re: How to format negative numbers?

RW9 — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 08:17:17 GMT

A search is your friend:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/Base-SAS-Programming/Numeric-variable-with-ve-sign-and-leading-zeros/td-p/37410

Re: How to format negative numbers?

Astounding — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 10:55:04 GMT

The variable names CHAR1, CHAR2, and CHAR3 sound suspiciously like character variables. Are they character or are they numeric?

If you have non-zero values after the decimal point such as -8.3000, what would you like the result to be? How about the result for an original value of -8.99?

You said you tried PROC FORMAT. What did you already try, that didn't work?

If the value is positive such as 8.0000, should it also lose the zeros?

The solution might be as simple as this:

char1 = scan(char1, 1, '.') ;

The harder part is spelling out the problem.

Re: How to format negative numbers?

ballardw — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 15:37:45 GMT

Show your proc format code.