topic Re: Sort data order by in proc sql in SAS Programming

Sort data order by in proc sql

radha009 — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 14:38:10 GMT

i have the following data, the sort results different from the SAS order by sort. Looks like '-' variable sort first in the SAS code - Please help.

Code:

proc sql;
Create table lib.fruits as
select Name, calories,Fat,carb,protein from lib.fruits_data
order by upper(Name) asc;
quit;

result:

Expected sort same as excel :

Tom — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 14:43:55 GMT

Why would Excel sort hyphen before space? Perhaps it is using some strange multi-step logic for sorting?

ballardw — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 17:28:00 GMT

You can find the ASCII sort order with this code:

data junk;
do i= 32 to 255;
   x= byte(i);
   output;
end;
run;

Characters with position less than 32 are generally not used for printed output.

The actual behavior you see might involve a higher order value impersonating a space that appears as a blank in your data.

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.