calculate difference between character numbers

Jedrzej — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 08:08:05 GMT

Hi I have two variables with descriptive statistics and I need to calculate the difference between them

_name_	var1	var2	var_want
mean(sd)	76.4(11.39)	77.2(8.63)
min,max	40.0,113.0	50.0,106.0

i've tried this,example

if _name_="min,max" then var_want=substr(var,1,2)-substr(var2,1,2)||","||substr(var,6,3)-substr(var2,6,3)

but it doesn't work cause 40-50=-10 and sas cannot convert it to char (invalid numeric data)

is there a simple way to calculate the difference between var1 and var2 ?

Re: calculate difference between character numbers

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 08:22:51 GMT

Maxim 2: Read the Log.

You will find NOTEs about automatic conversion of character to numeric and back.

To do reliable calculations, convert to numeric explicitly. The conversion back to character can be done implicitly by using the CATS function:

data have;
input _name_ :$10. var1 :$15. var2 :$15.;
datalines;
mean(sd)  76.4(11.39) 77.2(8.63)
min,max 40.0,113.0  50.0,106.0
;

data want;
set have;
if _name_="min,max"
then var_want = cats(
  input(scan(var1,1,","),best.) - input(scan(var2,1,","),best.),
  ",",
  input(scan(var1,2,","),best.) - input(scan(var2,2,","),best.)
);
run;

Also please note how I presented your data in a data step with datalines; please do so yourself in the future, as others can easily recreate a dataset with a simple copy/paste and submit, without any doubts about variable types, attributes and content.

topic Re: calculate difference between character numbers in SAS Programming

calculate difference between character numbers

Re: calculate difference between character numbers