topic Looking for the Proper Informat in SAS Programming

Looking for the Proper Informat

PaigeMiller — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 20:06:22 GMT

I have a very long program, that is taking too long. I figured I would read the LOG back into a data step to search for the steps where the elapsed time is high. In the LOG, you get lines such as

      real time           0.02 seconds
      real time        1:16.09 seconds

so the first step of the program took 2 one-hundredths of a second, while the second step took one minute, 16 and 9/100 seconds.

How to read this in so that the numerical part is recognized as actual times? To simplify even further, here's some relevant code

data a;
input string $ 1-10;
elapsed_time = input(string,time10.2);
cards;
0.02
1:16.09
;

but this seems to turn the 0.02 from the first line into 120 seconds or 2 minutes. The second line isn't converted at all by the informat. What is the proper informat to use here? I want the first line to be converted to 0.02 seconds, and the second line to be converted to 1 minute, 16.09 seconds.

Re: Looking for the Proper Informat

ballardw — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 20:19:06 GMT

I think you want the STIMER. informat.

Read times in the format as written to the Log from the documentation.

Re: Looking for the Proper Informat

PaigeMiller — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 20:27:32 GMT

Great Caesar's Ghost! You are correct! I never heard of STIMER before. Thanks.

Re: Looking for the Proper Informat

dcmacedo — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 21:09:02 GMT

My suggestion is always to consult the SAS documentation, or some reference document. For example:

Formats:

Informats: