topic Re: Formatting decimal points after using Cat function in SAS Programming

Formatting decimal points after using Cat function

hwangnyc — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 15:22:52 GMT

Hi everyone,

I have a mean, lower CI variable and upper CI variable. I would like the combine them into one variable. The issue is the CI variable has a long decimal trail. I would like to limit it to two decimals after using the Cat function. So here is my code currently:

data have;
input Mean  :  lowerCLmean : upperCLmean;
cards;
45               30.123456                         50.789123
20               15.789123                         30.123456

;

data want;
set have;
new=cat(mean,' (',lowerclmean,'-',upperclmean,')');

proc print;run;

What I really want:

Obs Mean lowerCLmean upperCLmean Really Want

15.7891

30.1235

20 (15.78-30.12)

Thanks in advance!

Re: Formatting decimal points after using Cat function

ballardw — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 15:26:46 GMT

data want;
set have;
new=cat(mean,' (',put(lowerclmean,f5.2 -L),'-',put(upperclmean,F5.2 -L),')');

You can nest all sorts of functions inside the cat, cats, catt, catx etc. functions as long as the results are strings.

Re: Formatting decimal points after using Cat function

hwangnyc — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 17:42:30 GMT

Thank you Ballard! Can you tell me what the "-L" does?

Re: Formatting decimal points after using Cat function

ballardw — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 20:19:01 GMT

The -L left justifies the result. if your value were actually 9.33 without the -L there would be a leading space as the F5.2 format will display the result in 5 columns and right justified by default: " 9.33" . Since it appeared that you did not want the CI to look like ( 9.33-12.75) for example I used that option.

Character formats will default to left justification but if you want right justification when using Put with a character format you could use put(somevar,$charfmt. -R) which may appear better for some table row headers or graph axis values.