topic Re: PROC Compare and text values in SAS Procedures

PROC Compare and text values

Doug — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 15:30:39 GMT

I am comparing two datasets where the following values exist on the same records in both:

^S={font_face=Symbol}£^S={}0.25

I visually inspected the values and even copied them to EXCEL (EXCEL says they are equal)...I also used the STRIP function to remove any leading or trailing blanks. Any ideas as to why SAS says they are not equal?

Re: PROC Compare and text values

Amir — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 18:06:53 GMT

Hi,

Does one of the columns have a format applied to it, perhaps?

What do you get if you submit the following?:

data have1;

a='^S={font_face=Symbol}£^S={}0.25';

run;

data have2;

a='^S={font_face=Symbol}£^S={}0.25';

run;

proc compare base =have1

compare=have2;

run;

The above shows no difference on SAS 9.1.3 on PC and Mainframe.

Regards,

Amir.

Re: PROC Compare and text values

Doug — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 19:12:27 GMT

These come out the same. I think it was due to the word "symbol" having a capital letter in one instance and not in the other.

Re: PROC Compare and text values

MumSquared — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 19:37:16 GMT

If you do not care about case then you can use upcase() to convert the text to all be upper case when you strip out the spaces.

I often use upcase(compress(variable)) when manually coding text matching, compress removes the spaces within the text too.

Watch out for spelling mistakes when comparing text this way - I have seen 5 different ways of spelling coffee!

Re: PROC Compare and text values

ballardw — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:30:41 GMT

Five ways to spell coffee is nothing, I had some survey data where IBM was spelled 18 ways. The most creative was I>B>M> .