topic Re: understanding how to interpret the statement in SAS Programming

understanding how to interpret the statement

CathyVI — Fri, 03 May 2019 14:57:59 GMT

My difficulty is understanding this sentence so as to write the code. Identify encounters that are missing medication data by: Setting Source Hospital Identifier To my knowledge, I interpreted it as identifying missing values by setting so I thought about using "if then/else. The variables are char variables. I feel I did not interpret the statement correctly. Help !!

data drug;

set Im.med;

if encounter_id = " " then setting = " ";

else if enconter_id = " " then setting = " ";

run;

Re: understanding how to interpret the statement

PaigeMiller — Fri, 03 May 2019 15:11:24 GMT

Sorry to give you an answer that you don't want to hear, but this is not a SAS problem. You ought to consult with the subject matter experts and your company or university who can explain what is needed here.

Re: understanding how to interpret the statement

ballardw — Fri, 03 May 2019 15:11:33 GMT

It would likely help to provide some examples of your data with some records showing some missing medication data and others not.

Instructions here: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/How-to-create-a-data-step-version-of-your-data-AKA-generate/ta-p/258712 will show how to turn an existing SAS data set into data step code that can be pasted into a forum code box using the {i} icon or attached as text to show exactly what you have and that we can test code against.

Re: understanding how to interpret the statement

VDD — Fri, 03 May 2019 15:19:51 GMT

here is a fair link to get you started.

https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000202239.htm

basically if condition is meet the statement is set else if the condition fails then the else condition is tested. and so on and so on for each else condition until a condition is set.

there are much better ways to handle setting variables but your basic if then else is a fair starting point.

Re: understanding how to interpret the statement

Reeza — Fri, 03 May 2019 17:20:11 GMT

Identify encounters that are missing medication data by: Setting Source Hospital Identifier

This seems incomplete? Missing medication is relatively easy, personally I prefer to use the MISSING() function because it doesn't matter if the variable is character or numeric.

if missing(encounter_id) then

BUt why are you checking if the encounterID is missing, when it asks about medication?

We really can't answer this at all, because we don't know the data, context or question.

@CathyVI wrote:

My difficulty is understanding this sentence so as to write the code. Identify encounters that are missing medication data by: Setting Source Hospital Identifier To my knowledge, I interpreted it as identifying missing values by setting so I thought about using "if then/else. The variables are char variables. I feel I did not interpret the statement correctly. Help !!

data drug;

set Im.med;

if encounter_id = " " then setting = " ";

else if enconter_id = " " then setting = " ";

run;