topic Recoding from character to numeric with formats in SAS Programming

Recoding from character to numeric with formats

BruceBrad — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:23:28 GMT

I'm trying to recode some character values into numeric values. Here is some code that doesn't work. What have I done wrong?

proc format;

invalue testf 'A' 'B' = 1 'C' 'D' = 0;

run;

data _null_;

chr='A';

num = input(chr,testf.);

run;

Recoding from character to numeric with formats

Ksharp — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:00:24 GMT

How about:

proc format;

invalue testf

'A' ,'B' = 1

'C' ,'D' = 0;

run;

data temp;

chr='A';

num = input(chr,testf.);

run;

Ksharp

Recoding from character to numeric with formats

BruceBrad — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:51:24 GMT

Thanks. The curious thing about this is that proc format without the required commas does not give an error message. The error only occurs when I use the incorrect format in the data step. And a very unhelpful message too:

NOTE: Invalid argument to function INPUT at line 38 column 7.

chr=A num=. _ERROR_=1 _N_=1

NOTE: Mathematical operations could not be performed at the following places. The results of

the operations have been set to missing values.

(I'm using version 9.3)

Re: Recoding from character to numeric with formats

data_null__ — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:41:48 GMT

You don't get an error because the code is correct. The value/invalue statements have implied concatenation, which is most useful if you need to use two different types of constants. For example a character constant followed by a HEX constant. "Hello' 'F2'x

You can see how PROC FORMAT processed your statements by adding the FMTLIB option.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|     INFORMAT NAME: @TESTF   LENGTH:    2   NUMBER OF VALUES:    2        |
|   MIN LENGTH:   1  MAX LENGTH:  40  DEFAULT LENGTH   2  FUZZ:        0   |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|START           |END             |INVALUE(VER. V7|V8   10OCT2011:06:40:11)|
|----------------+----------------+----------------------------------------|
|AB              |AB              |                                       1|
|CD              |CD              |                                       0|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------