topic Re: Repeated characters in SAS Programming

Repeated characters

Saleem — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 13:06:41 GMT

Hi Team,

data ds1;

infiledatalines;

input star;

cards;

***

****

*****

run;

how to create 10000 stars at a time by using sas

Thanks in advance

Re: Repeated characters

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 13:13:10 GMT

Please use descriptive subject lines in the future, so others do not need to do that for you. Using just "sas" (sic) in the SAS communities does not shine a positive light on a poster's intelligence.

For your question:

data want (compress=yes);
length stars $32767;
do i_n_= 1 to 10000;
  stars = repeat('*',_n_);
  output;
end;
run;

Re: Repeated characters

Astounding — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 13:50:33 GMT

The REPEAT function has a quirk ... it starts with the first string, and then repeats it the number of times in the second parameter. So the first value generated would be ** rather than *. I imagine that a value of 0 for the second parameter is OK, and that the loop should go from 0 to 9999 instead of 1 to 10000.

Re: Repeated characters

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 14:43:24 GMT

I must admit that I just know that the function exists, but have never used it. And, to my shame, I did not mention the code is untested (I am on my tablet at the moment while watching NFL Gamepass).