topic Re: Create a Custom Data Set (Manually) in SAS? in SAS Programming

Create a Custom Data Set (Manually) in SAS?

SasStatistics — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 19:20:38 GMT

Say I want to create a dataset (manually by hard coding each value) looking like this:

Column1 Column2 Column3

1 2 3

4 5 6

How would I do this?

This is trivial to do in for instance Python, R or MATLAB. But I do not know how to do this in SAS. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Re: Create a Custom Data Set (Manually) in SAS?

mkeintz — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 19:28:39 GMT

Is this what you mean by trivial?

data want;
  input column1-column3;
datalines;
1 2 3
4 5 6
run;

Or maybe you are actually looking for:

data want;
  column1=1; column2=2; column3=3; output;
  column1=4; column2=5; column3=6; output;
run;

Re: Create a Custom Data Set (Manually) in SAS?

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 19:31:20 GMT

One slight correction:

data want;
  input column1-column3;
datalines;
1 2 3
4 5 6
;

Terminate the DATALINES block with a single semicolon on its own line. The RUN statement afterwards is optional.

Re: Create a Custom Data Set (Manually) in SAS?

mkeintz — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 22:20:02 GMT

@Kurt_Bremser wrote:

One slight correction:
data want;
  input column1-column3;
datalines;
1 2 3
4 5 6
;
Terminate the DATALINES block with a single semicolon on its own line. The RUN statement afterwards is optional.

True, the naked semi-colon is a bit more terse, which I think is important to the OP. But I've never been a fan of using it, since run; works both for this, and for data steps that don't use the datalines; statement.

Re: Create a Custom Data Set (Manually) in SAS?

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 08:00:27 GMT

The documentation of the DATALINES statement is quite specific:

Use a null statement (a single semicolon) to indicate the end of the input data.

So one must not be surprised if the "run" becomes part of the input data sometime in the future.