topic Re: Get 16 characters of a variable in SAS Programming

Get 16 characters of a variable

Angel_Saenz — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:07:00 GMT

How can I get 16 characters of a variable starting from right and fill blank spaces with zeros?, example:

Var 1 Minimum has 6 characters and is incremented

Var 2 Always has 3 characters

Var1 Var2

123456 100

1234567 100

12345678 100

I want to have result

var3

0000000123456100

0000001234567100

0000012345678100

Re: Get 16 characters of a variable

ballardw — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:13:51 GMT

Is Var1 character or numeric?

Here's one way. Pick the appropriate for the var1 variable type:

data example;
   Var1Num= 123456;
   var2 = 100;
   var1char = '123456';
   var3num = cats(put(var1num,z13.),var2);
   var3char= cats(put(input(var1char,best16.),z13.),var2);
run;

Re: Get 16 characters of a variable

Angel_Saenz — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:18:17 GMT

var1 and var2 are numeric, butI need var3 char16 because I need to marge with other var (char16)

Re: Get 16 characters of a variable

RW9 — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:35:26 GMT

Something like:

data want;
  set have;
  length var3 $16;
  var3=cats(put(var1,z13.),put(var2,z3.));
run;

Putting a value into a Zx. format padds out the number with '0' characters to thelength specified.

Re: Get 16 characters of a variable

Angel_Saenz — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 18:47:16 GMT

THANK YOU

Re: Get 16 characters of a variable

ballardw — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 19:26:15 GMT

@Angel_Saenz wrote:
var1 and var2 are numeric, butI need var3 char16 because I need to marge with other var (char16)

Set the Length for the desired variable before assigning the value:

Length var3 $ 16.;

That will set the length instead of using the default coming from the CATS function.