topic Re: Width specified for format invalid in SAS Programming

Width specified for format invalid

Putt_Ka — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:04:48 GMT

Greetings again all!

I'm using the ODS Tagset ExcelXP and ProcPrint multiple tables to multiple sheets in excel (well first to XML then Excel). My problem is that when my dataset comes back blank no sheet is written, and my work book is considerably smaller. To fix this problem I use the following MACRO (thnx SAS forum!):

%macro IFz1(data=&syslast) /des= 'if Zero make 1 obs' ;

data &data ;

if nobs then stop ;

output ;

modify &data nobs=nobs ;

stop ;

run ;

%mend IFz1;

This inserts one observation when there are no observations. The problem is that it can't add an observation when a date is involved; example:

proc sql;

CREATE TABLE foo AS

SELECT

date1 format mmddyy11. AS date2,

FROM foo2;

%IFz1 will then run but come back with ERROR: Width specified for format MMDDYY is invalid, when I comment out the "format mmddyy11." it works fine and inserts a blank observation. I believe that my column "date1" in my example is a DateTime data type. If I change the format to mmddyyyy the column says: "5at1946" and is a "custom" data type in excel.

Has anyone encountered this before, and is there a work around? I would love to know!

Loving the SAS community so far, I hope to contribute at some point

Thanks again!

Re: Width specified for format invalid

ballardw — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:21:01 GMT

According to the documentation for SAS 9.3 mmddyy only has a range of 2 to 10 allowed. Change the 11 to 10 and it should work.

Re: Width specified for format invalid

SASKiwi — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:28:08 GMT

If you check out the documentation:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/leforinforref/63324/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p1og22ny80wqj5n1a1oxayemz4bt.htm

You will see that the maximum length for the mmddyy format is 10, hence the error you are getting. Also specify a format in SQL like so: select date1 format = mmddyy10. as date2

Re: Width specified for format invalid

Putt_Ka — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 14:29:39 GMT

Magic!

Thanks all!