topic Re: CONDITIONALLY DELETING FIRST OBSERVATION in New SAS User

CONDITIONALLY DELETING FIRST OBSERVATION

d6k5d3 — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:19:52 GMT

For this I have already looked at the posts in the community, but they seemed to not serve my purpose. I tried the following code, which did not work.

data zzz; 
set yyy; 
by return notsorted; 
if Day= "Sun" and first.return then delete; 
run;

I have the following table:

Date Time Day Return

03/05 12:20 Sun 2.45

03/05 12:30 Sun 3.23

03/05 12:35 Sun 2.03

03/05 12:40 Sun 2.55

03/05 12:45 Sun 3.11

03/05 12:50 Sun 2.67

03/06 12:25 Mon 2.99

03/06 12:30 Mon 3.09

03/06 12:35 Mon 2.05

03/06 12:40 Mon 2.61

03/06 12:45 Mon 3.32

03/06 12:50 Mon 2.39

...

03/12 12:20 Sun 2.92

03/12 12:30 Sun 3.13

03/12 12:35 Sun 2.63

03/12 12:40 Sun 2.15

03/12 12:45 Sun 3.51

03/12 12:50 Sun 2.57

I want to delete the first observation of each Sunday. What was wrong with my code? A lot more than expected rows got deleted. 52 Sundays in a year times 12 years = 624 observations are supposed to be deleted.

Re: CONDITIONALLY DELETING FIRST OBSERVATION

Tom — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:34:10 GMT

Sounds like you want FIRST.DAY instead of FIRST.RETURN. Since you have mulitple values or RETURN for each value of DAY the flag FIRST.RETURN could will be true multiple times on a Sunday. But FIRST.DAY will be true only for the first record for that day.

Re: CONDITIONALLY DELETING FIRST OBSERVATION

d6k5d3 — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:56:59 GMT

Thanks a lot! Yes, that makes sense. What a stupid SAS beginner I am! 😄

Re: CONDITIONALLY DELETING FIRST OBSERVATION

PeterClemmensen — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 11:53:35 GMT

@d6k5d3, far from stupid asking questions in here 😉 Welcome to the SAS communities.