topic Re: Organizing Messy Data in New SAS User

Organizing Messy Data

Jcox22 — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 12:25:48 GMT

I'm a new SAS programmer and am currently working on a dataset thats disorganized like this:

data1 var1 data2 var2 data3 var3

data1 var1 data1 var1 data2 var2 ...

I was wondering if there was a pointer in sas (like @) that would allow me to point before the variable to organize the data. Thanks

EDIT: Resolved

Re: Organizing Messy Data

Astounding — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 04:06:02 GMT

Not sure if this is what you are after, but the INPUT statement supports moving to a character string within the line such as:

input @'data1' +5 var1;

Re: Organizing Messy Data

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:23:10 GMT

In your second row, you have two values for "var1". How do you want to handle such an occurrence? First value, last value, or do you want to output a separate observation for each value? In the latter case, what do you want to do with the other name/value pairs in the same input line?

It would be helpful if you posted the expected dataset from your input data.