topic Re: Access specifics columns in a table with large number of columns in SAS Programming

Access specifics columns in a table with large number of columns

ateffal — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 10:38:23 GMT

Hi,

I want to access specific columns in a SAS table (more than 1000 columns) within a DO loop : for example column number 2 until column before the last one in order to do some specific treatements for each column. How can we do that ?

Thanks

Re: Access specifics columns in a table with large number of columns

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 11:29:54 GMT

As long as all the variables you want to treat are of the same type (character or numeric), you can define an array over them and iterate through that.

Re: Access specifics columns in a table with large number of columns

ateffal — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 11:48:17 GMT

Thnks for your reply but unfortunately this is not the case. There is as many numerics as characters.

Re: Access specifics columns in a table with large number of columns

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 12:03:50 GMT

You might give us some clue about the structure of the dataset, regarding order of variables, and which need to be treated.

You still can use two arrays for _numeric_ and _character_, and iterate separately through both.

Re: Access specifics columns in a table with large number of columns

Tom — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 15:45:16 GMT

You cannot easily do that, and in general it would make no sense.

You can define arrays. You can use Variable Lists.

array all_num _numeric_ ;
array all_str _character_;
array some_num firstvar-numeric-lastvar ;
array some_str firstchar-character-lastchar ;

What is the actual PROBLEM that you are trying to solve? Perhaps there is another way to do it that does not requiring treating your dataset as if it was a spreadsheet.