if-then statement not working

[kfluegge]

Hi. I have the if then statement below. "Disch" is a date variable (format YYYY-MM-DD). When running the code, the DEATH variable is blank even for records where the value of ddest = 20. I wish for the DEATH variable to be populated with the DISCH date when ddest = 20. This seems like it should be quite simple, but apparently I do not know how to do it.

if ddest = 20 then disch = DEATH;

[Astounding]

It looks like you got it backwards:

if ddest = 20 then DEATH = disch;

It's a good idea to read the notes on the log.  You should have seen something like this:

NOTE:  The variable death is uninitialized.

That's SAS's way of saying that it doesn't exist so you can't copy from it.

[ballardw]

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@Astounding wrote:

It looks like you got it backwards:

if ddest = 20 then DEATH = disch;

It's a good idea to read the notes on the log.  You should have seen something like this:

NOTE:  The variable death is uninitialized.

That's SAS's way of saying that it doesn't exist so you can't copy from it.

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And you likely want to make sure that you have a date format of some type assigned to the DEATH variable if disch is a SAS date valued variable.

[SuryaKiran]

Does your source data have same datatypes for both of the variables disch & death. From what you explained it must be death=disch instead of the opposite way.

If they are of different datatypes then create a new variable or rename death from source dataset and create death in new dataset.