topic Re: Base Certification in SAS Programming

Base Certification

alep92 — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 15:59:52 GMT

Hi,

I found a question in the SAS base certification that I didn't undestand:

input @45 name $10;

Which input technique is used in the above statement?

a)column input

b)formatted input

c)list input

Why the correct answer is a?

What does it mean insert the column pointer control @45 and tell sas to read the tenth column?

Thanks,

Alessandro

Re: Base Certification

Reeza — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 16:05:38 GMT

Go to column 45 and read the first ten characters, so the equivalent of reading from columns 45-54, inclusive.

Re: Base Certification

ballardw — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 16:31:19 GMT

I suspect that you misstyped the actual input statement.

Double checkt to see if it was :

input @45 name $10.; < note the . after 10

The $10. would say "read starting at column 45 using character format for 10 characters".

Re: Base Certification

alep92 — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 08:59:54 GMT

I use SAS Studio and if I run this example SAS reads only the tenth column so the value of the variable 'name' is 'n'

data ex.dat1;
input @45 name $10;
datalines;
departement
;
run;

It seems that SAS ignores the column pointer control @45

Re: Base Certification

alep92 — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 09:08:27 GMT

By using $10. after the name of the variable everything work but in the exercise that I have found the input statement is written as I wrote in the first post. I don't know if it is an error or it has another meaning.

Re: Base Certification

Cynthia_sas — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 17:10:14 GMT

Hi:
Where did you find the exercise? Is it in one of the classes that we offer? Is it in a quiz in the Certification Prep Guide? Is it in the Practice Exam for one of the certifications? Without knowing WHERE the question came from, it is hard to answer your question about whether it has another meaning. Perhaps you were meant to correct the INPUT statement so it would work. You did not provide the FULL text of the question, only your code snippet. Usually, with our courses or the Prep Guide or the Practice exam, the code snippet is preceded by a full question. Without seeing the full text of the question that went with your code snippet, it is impossible to comment.

cynthia

Re: Base Certification

alep92 — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 20:05:13 GMT

I have found the exercise in "SAS Certification Review: Base Programming for SAS9" at page 3-7.

The question that I have posted is exactly the same question question that I found in the book.

Re: Base Certification

Reeza — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 20:26:22 GMT

Can you post an image please?

Re: Base Certification

alep92 — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 20:48:43 GMT

This is the slide where I found the exercise

Re: Base Certification

Cynthia_sas — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 02:50:52 GMT

Hi:

Ah, thanks for posting that image. I understand now.

That slide is a quiz question from our class for Certification Prep Review: https://support.sas.com/edu/schedules.html?ctry=us&id=58 Did you take that class or did you get the book from someone else?

When we teach that class, the instructor goes over the answers with the students. In the certification review class, we tell students that this is an example of how a missing period (.) can entirely change the meaning of this INPUT statement.

IF the statement had been:
input @45 name $10.;
then the correct answer would have been B (FORMATTED input) and you would have been instructing SAS to start at position 45 and read 10 characters into the NAME variable.

However, without the period after the $10, this is still a valid INPUT statement

input @45 name $10;

the @45 is merely a distractor because, even if you send the pointer to position 45, as soon as there is not an informat detected, then the remaining "name $10" turns into COLUMN input (Answer A) and you are instructing SAS to go to position 10 and ONLY read position 10 into the NAME variable. That is why when you try the code with test data, you will only see 1 character for NAME.

So, for example, see the comparison of COLUMN input vs FORMATTED input in the SAS log and see what a difference NOT having a period makes between reading 1 position and reading 10 positions. I made a fake data file where every character was unique, so you could trace exactly what character was being read. Here is the data file quiz_cert.txt:

Quiz_Cert.txt:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

COLUMN input as coded:

FORMATTED input as corrected:

Here is the full page from the class (quiz answers are at the back of the chapter. For this quiz, the correct answer is A; but with a single period added to the $10. then the correct answer would be B.

cynthia

Re: Base Certification

toconero — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:41:44 GMT

Ciao Cynthia,

In this link http://support.sas.com/certify/creds/samples/ , there are a few examples, I hope that they will help you preparing your exam

Re: Base Certification

Muwanguzi — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 18:39:18 GMT

I bought those questions, I dont think they are gonna be the solution to your search, you gonna need to read more about writing data sets from raw data, UCLA website, UC SanDiego and JMP have free and detailed information that might be more helpful than these questions,