topic Re: multiple varaibles with same name in SAS Programming

multiple varaibles with same name

rohithverma — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:20:16 GMT

Hi All,

Could we have same variable names two times in sas dataset.Please help me .

Eg: NAME SEX HEIGHT WEIGHT SEX

Re: multiple varaibles with same name

PaigeMiller — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:21:40 GMT

No, you can't do this. You could name the second occurrence as SEX2

Re: multiple varaibles with same name

ed_sas_member — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:27:24 GMT

Hi @rohithverma

That's not possible at all in a dataset.

However, you can have that in a report for display:

proc sql;
	select name, sex, height, weight, sex from sashelp.class;
run;

Re: multiple varaibles with same name

Reeza — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:47:38 GMT

Another option is to use a variable label.

proc print data=sashelp.class labels noobs;
var name age sex weight height;
label name = 'Name' age = 'Age' sex = 'Sex' weight = 'Name' ;
run;

Re: multiple varaibles with same name

ballardw — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 16:31:40 GMT

@rohithverma wrote:

Hi All,

Could we have same variable names two times in sas dataset.Please help me .

Eg: NAME SEX HEIGHT WEIGHT SEX

Why? Please describe what you would use this for. Possibly in quite a bit of detail.

At first glance this sounds like a "make SAS data look like Excel" question. Which is in many case not a good idea for analysis. But the final output in a Report may be made to look somewhat like that.

I spend entirely too much time cleaning up data generated in spreadsheets that has the "same variable" multiple times and NEVER does the variable actually mean the exact same thing. One typical example is "Total". Where in one column Total is "Total number of Students" in another column "Total number of students enrolled in Class X" (repeat for class Y, Z, etc). So the "Total" is not the same value and hence should be a different variable.

Re: multiple varaibles with same name

PaigeMiller — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 16:37:42 GMT

Yes, @rohithverma , if you provide some context for you question, you will likely get more useful answers than all the guessing in the dark that I and others have done.

Re: multiple varaibles with same name

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 18:23:49 GMT

@rohithverma wrote:

Hi All,

Could we have same variable names two times in sas dataset.Please help me .

Eg: NAME SEX HEIGHT WEIGHT SEX

No. You can have the same label, though.