topic Re: Creating a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable in SAS Programming

Creating a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable

LunaMinerva — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:58:53 GMT

Hello all.

I'm getting started with SAS and I need a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable. My dataset looks like this:

CITY $ var2 var3

London . .

New York . .

Madrid . .

I'm using the IF THEN command in order to get the system to create a new numerical variable starting from the city names (IF CITY=London THEN CITYNR=1; IF CITY=Madrid THEN CITYNR=2; etc), but I can't bring the code to work. The output table has new columns for CITYNR, LONDON, MADRID, etc, which is of course something I don't want. Just for the sake of it I tried the same command starting from a numerical variable like var2 or var3 and it works.

What am I getting wrong? Can anyone help me? Thank you so much!

Re: Creating a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable

mkeintz — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:03:25 GMT

The logical test

IF CITY=LONDON

tells SAS to compare the CITY var to the LONDON var, so SAS assumes there is an (unitialized) var named LONDON.

You really want to test CITY var against a literal VALUE, as in

if CITY='LONDON' then .... ;
else if CITY='MADRID' then ....;

Re: Creating a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable

LunaMinerva — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:08:32 GMT

Ok, so I just tried putting the city names between apostrophes and it does work because I'm finally getting the CITYNR column I was looking for with the correct numbers, but I'm also still getting empty columns for each city name. What else am I getting wrong?

Re: Creating a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable

HB — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:58:12 GMT

Post the code you are using.

Re: Creating a conditional variable starting from a non-numerical variable

RW9 — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 15:01:17 GMT

Post your test data as a datastep, follow this post if you don't know how to:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/How-to-create-a-data-step-version-of-your-data-AKA-generate/ta-p/258712

Its very hard for us to be guessing everything, for instance, do you have spaces before or after the text? "ABC " is not the same as "ABC". Also show your code.