topic Re: How to indirectly refer to a column header in SAS Programming

How to indirectly refer to a column header

timj22 — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 20:54:55 GMT

Hi everyone,

I have a dataset where one column is filled with column headers, and I was to return the value from that header back to that row.

For example

SAS DAta Set:

Name Lookup 1 2 3 Return

John 2 a d v d

Tim 2 a c v c

Kat 3 c d v v

Jim 1 c c d c

So as you can see from above

if lookup = 2 then return the value from column 2.

Now my dataset is much larger so I cant just use if/then to bring back every combination..

Any ideas?

Cheers

Re: How to indirectly refer to a column header

Astounding — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 21:13:56 GMT

This should be a straightforward application of arrays:

data want;

set have;

array vars {3} v1 v2 v3;

return = vars{lookup};

run;

Note that I illustrated using variable names of V1, V2, and V3, since 1, 2, and 3 are not valid variable names in SAS. Also note that you may need to assign a length to RETURN before assigning a value. If the variables in the array have different lengths, you may need to ensure that RETURN is assigned a long enough length to hold the longest value it might encounter.

Re: How to indirectly refer to a column header

Reeza — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 22:02:56 GMT

Look at the VVALUE/VVALUEX function.