I'm trying to convert a set of character strings into numbers, and it's not as expected.
Anyone have any ideas on how to trouble shoot?
data want;
set have;
num=input(char,best32.);
run;
1 | 323242600026000064512 | 323242600026000122499 |
2 | 313244000040000684032 | 313244000040000698990 |
3 | 313242000020000145408 | 313242000020000198990 |
4 | 314245000050000134144 | 314245000050000159970 |
5 | 323242600026000261120 | 323242600026000222499 |
6 | 323242600026000261120 | 323242600026000222499 |
7 | 313244000040000290816 | 313244000040000298990 |
8 | 323242600026000064512 | 323242600026000122499 |
9 | 423242250022500433920 | 423242250022500512797 |
10 | 323245000050000134144 | 323245000050000171980 |
Assuming you are on a PC, the maximum precision that can be stored by SAS integers is 16 digits (2**53) since SAS stores numbers in 64 bits (8 bytes), and some of these are not used for the mantissa (the digits of the number). Your numbers are longer than this.
If you store real numbers, full precison is not always possible, and SAS has further issues (see https://communities.sas.com/t5/Base-SAS-Programming/Expected-numeric-precision-behaviour-or-unexpect...).
Assuming you are on a PC, the maximum precision that can be stored by SAS integers is 16 digits (2**53) since SAS stores numbers in 64 bits (8 bytes), and some of these are not used for the mantissa (the digits of the number). Your numbers are longer than this.
If you store real numbers, full precison is not always possible, and SAS has further issues (see https://communities.sas.com/t5/Base-SAS-Programming/Expected-numeric-precision-behaviour-or-unexpect...).
Thanks Chris! This was exceptionally informative and helpful.
What do these numbers represent? Leave them as character if you are not doing mathematics on them.
Thanks SASKiwi. This was a unique problem that we ran into, and in the future we're going to restructure our coding algorithms to use character strings instead.
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