topic Re: PERCENT FORMAT that will yield "0.x" if less than 1% in SAS Programming

PERCENT FORMAT that will yield "0.x" if less than 1%

bbenbaruch — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:41:04 GMT

Is there a format that will make sure that all output has the same number of digits to the right of the decimal point regardless of whether the value is less than 1%? t seems to me that there should be something like a PERCENTZ.d format that will output a 0 to the left of the decimal point when appropriate. Is there such a format?

Example: a column of values output using the PERCENT7.3 format:

7.44%
3.36%
.242%

What I want:

7.44%
3.36%
0.24%

Re: PERCENT FORMAT that will yield "0.x" if less than 1%

PaigeMiller — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:43:10 GMT

PERCENT7.2 ought to give you the desired results

Re: PERCENT FORMAT that will yield "0.x" if less than 1%

Reeza — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:49:13 GMT

Your width is too small. You've set it to 7 total but it's not enough to hold all the values so the zero is truncated. Make the width larger to avoid the issue.

Percent12.3 works with original data.

If you have any chance of having negative values you want to make it wider as well.

I would recommend using percent12.2 as your format. That's usually wide enough to avoid most issues.

Re: PERCENT FORMAT that will yield "0.x" if less than 1%

bbenbaruch — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 19:37:18 GMT

Thanks. I feel silly because I forgot the difference between PERCENTw.d and PERCENTNw.d. (The difference is in how negative percentages are output. PERCENTw.d outputs them in parentheses requiring accounting for 2 additional characters in the output.)

PERCENTN7.2 will also work -- when I know that all of my percentages will be between 99.99% and -99.99%.

Re: PERCENT FORMAT that will yield "0.x" if less than 1%

Rick_SAS — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 13:03:06 GMT

For a summary of the PERCENTw.d and PERCENTNw.d formats and a discussion of field widths, see "Those tricky PERCENT formats."