Label groups in PROC SGPLOT

[somebody]

I drawing some graphs (time series) with PROC SGPLOT. I use the GROUP function to have one line for each group. The value of the group in my dataset is numerical (i.e. 0,1,2,3,4,5). However, when I draw the graphs, I would like to assign some name to each group so that it displays the names instead of the numbers. 

proc sgplot data=population;
	styleattrs datacontrastcolors=(red blue orange black)
	datasymbols=(circlefilled trianglefilled squarefilled dot)
	datalinepatterns=(solid dash longdash dot) ;
	series x=year y=population/group=continent;
run;
*continent variable can be 1,2,3,4 which corresponds to Asia, Europe, America and Africa; 
*So instead of displaying 4 lines with label 1,2,3,4 on the bottom, I would like to display Asia, Europe, America, Africa;

 Well, one way is to create another variable and assign string values corresponding to the numerical value. But I dont really want to do this as it consumes memory. I hope there is a quick way with PROC SGPLOT

[RW9 · Accepted solution]

Create a format with your decodes/strings, and apply the format to the data:

proc format;
  value tmp
    1="Asia"
    2=...;
run;

data population;
  set population;
  format continent tmp.;
run; 

Then it should display the strings.

[somebody]

Thanks, but I dont want to reformat or change the value of the continent
variable. I want to keep it as numbers.

[RW9]

Formatting does not change the underlying data, its still the number if you remove the format.  If you don't want to format the a data and you do not want to create a new variable, then you are stuck I am afraid, you have to tell SAS somehow what values to display.