topic Re: Question with Regard to Referring to Observation Number Variable in SAS in SAS Programming

Question with Regard to Referring to Observation Number Variable in SAS

JackZ295 — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:26:03 GMT

Hi! I was trying to read in a data set into SAS, but I ran into the following issue in my log:

WARNING: Some character data was lost during transcoding in column: sq105j_s at obs 3739.
WARNING: Some character data was lost during transcoding in column: sh102c at obs 14322.
WARNING: Some character data was lost during transcoding in column: db107_s at obs 16615.
WARNING: Some character data was lost during transcoding in column: ue115b at obs 21310.

I want to print out the data set and reference those observation numbers to see why those particular observations have issues.

How would I go about referring to the observation number in my SAS code (I know there is a built in SAS variable for observation number)? When I tried utilizing the _N_ variable, it didn't seem to work. Any input regarding this would be much appreciated! Thanks so much!

Re: Question with Regard to Referring to Observation Number Variable in SAS

Tom — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:44:58 GMT

It really depends on what code you ran that produced those notes.

If you just did something simple like:

data want;
  set have;
run;

Then you could use the _N_ automatic variable in another data step to filter to just the observations mentioned in the log.

data problems ;
  set have;
  if _n_ in (3739 14322 16615 21310);
run;

But to really see what was in that data that caused the transcoding issue you will want to read it without transcoding. So you might want to add ENCODING=ANY dataset option.

data problems ;
  set have (encoding=any);
  if _n_ in (3739 14322 16615 21310);
run;

Re: Question with Regard to Referring to Observation Number Variable in SAS

JackZ295 — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 05:45:30 GMT

Thanks so much for your help @Tom !