topic Re: leading zeros in SAS Programming

leading zeros

jcis7 — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:30:01 GMT

1. Do you see a problem wtih having a field that has different length numbers (Type 1 has 10 digits, Type 2 has 8 digiits) that may have leading zeros if I want to do Update the Master table with a transaction table or match merge or deduplicate?

2. How would you export the file into MS Access with the correct number of leading zeros retained?

ID Type

0123948578 1

0593827108 1

2983748597 1

02498377 2

00938478 2

Thanks!

Re: leading zeros

allurai0412 — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:39:55 GMT

hi,

if your question is about zeros ...please try this..

format id z5.

For 5 digits ....

format id z10.

Regards

ALLU

Re: leading zeros

jcis7 — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:47:33 GMT

Thanks! How do you export the same field with two different lengths into a MS Access database retaining the leading zeros? The only way I can think of is if you break the 10-digit facilities into 1 dataset and the 8 digit facilites into another dataset and format them separetly using the z format?

Re: leading zeros

SASKiwi — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:00:56 GMT

To ensure you retain leading zeros while exporting it would be preferable to convert ID to character columns:

if type = 1 then ID1 = put(ID, z10.);

else if type = 2 then ID2 = put(ID, z8.);

Its good practice to store IDs as character anyway so things like leading zeroes don't get lost.

Re: leading zeros

jcis7 — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:40:47 GMT

Thank you ! Very helpful!!