topic Re: What is the maximum order numeric variable that SAS is able to process? in SAS Programming

What is the maximum order numeric variable that SAS is able to process?

vkumbhakarna — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 16:32:42 GMT

Hi everyone,

This is my first post with SAS Support communities, so please bear with me and pardon my misgivings.

I ran into an issue lately where I was trying to convert a character variable into a numeric variable while extracting data from a dataset. The character variable was a 18 digit long numeric value stored as character. So, when I tried importing the variable and converting it into numeric using the input function, only the first 16 digits were getting converted successfully and the last 2 digits were getting arbitrarily random values. So, I took the empirical approach and devised the following simple code to check is SAS is able to process the numericals upto 10^18 numerical precision, and I found that last 2 digits were always lost. Can you please help me understand if my conclusion is correct? Is SAS unable to handle numerical variables beyond 10^16 value? Please adivse.

Code:

214 data _null_ ;

215 do i=1 to 17 ;

216 big_num = 10**i + 1 ;

217 put big_num best18. +2 i 2. ;

218 end ;

219 run ;

Result:

11 1

101 2

1001 3

10001 4

100001 5

1000001 6

10000001 7

100000001 8

1000000001 9

10000000001 10

100000000001 11

1000000000001 12

10000000000001 13

100000000000001 14

1000000000000001 15

10000000000000000 16

100000000000000000 17

For observation 16 and 17 it can be seen that the numerical precision is lost. Please advise how can I go around this issue? Thanks in advance.

Re: What is the maximum order numeric variable that SAS is able to process?

Tom — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 16:38:16 GMT

16 data _null_;

17 max=constant('exactint');

18 put max=comma21.;

19 run;

max=9,007,199,254,740,992

Easiest way to deal with it is to NOT convert your character variable into an numeric.

Re: What is the maximum order numeric variable that SAS is able to process?

Reeza — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 16:42:03 GMT

I don't believe this is a SAS specific issue, as I've seen it in Excel and R recently as well.

Re: What is the maximum order numeric variable that SAS is able to process?

jakarman — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 19:22:37 GMT

This is indeed no SAS specific issue. It is related to what processor you are using.

SAS(R) 9.2 Language Reference: Concepts, Second Edition (precision) The floating point area are processor instrcutions.

Do not forget SAS(R) 9.4 DS2 Language Reference, Second Edition as there the approach is differtent and the limitations are different.

http://blogs.sas.com/content/sastraining/2013/04/08/jedi-sas-tricks-finding-tattoine-with-ds2/

Floating point - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia