topic Re: character to numeric conversion in SAS Programming

character to numeric conversion

Explore_SAS9 — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:18:15 GMT

Below code is auto converting value 9d10 to 9e10.It is an account id column loaded into sas from TD.In TD the value is 9d10 whereas in SAS 9E100.

data test;

x=9d10;

run;

In test dataset the value of x is shown as 9e10.Anybody has any thoughts on why this happens?

Thanks in advance!

Re: character to numeric conversion

RW9 — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:25:07 GMT

The reason is that the variable X, for which you supply no information, is being created as length 8 numeric variable. Now 9d10 can be a number and can be represented as 9e10, or 9 to 10 places. You have not said what you want the variable to be? Maybe character (even if not, it is always good to state what type and length your varaibles are):

data test;
  length x $20;
  x="9d10";
run;

Re: character to numeric conversion

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 12:27:36 GMT

Strings need to be marked as such, use quotes:

data test;
x="9d10";
run;

Re: character to numeric conversion

Explore_SAS9 — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 07:07:08 GMT

Actually the data for account id is wrong in the source file itself.It should be a numeric value but is coming as a character.

Re: character to numeric conversion

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 07:15:27 GMT

Use the notdigit() function on a substring to determine if it's truly numeric before converting.

The .D... notation is mentioned in the 9.2 documentation for the Ew.d informat (which is just an alias for w.d in 9.4) as a valid numeric notation.

Re: character to numeric conversion

Tom — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 01:20:08 GMT

I do not understand your question. The numbers 9e100 and 9d100 are the same number. They both mean 9 times 10 raised to the 100th power. In the old days of Fortran they used the D instead of the E to mean to use double precision (8 byte) floating point instead of single precision (4 bytes). But in SAS all numbers are stored in 8 byte floating point.

If the field is an ACCOUNT number then you should probably be treating it as a character string in SAS. You will never need to take the mean of an ACCOUNT number. Also there is a limit to the number of digits that an 8 byte floating point number can represent exactly.

1     data _null_;
2       x=constant('exactint');
3       put x comma24. ;
4     run;

   9,007,199,254,740,992