Adding leading zeros to numeric fields

[Tom]

So I used EG 6.1 (with local SAS 9.4) and ran a simple program step to make an example file with one numeric and one character variable.

I then used both the interactive export and the export as a step in project flow to export the data set as a CSV.  The files were identical and both included the leading zeros.  Plus when I did the conversion as a step in the process flow then Enterprise Guide let be browse the created CSV file so that I could confirm that the leading zeros where there.

I also tried just attaching the Z2. format to the numeric variable with a FORMAT statement in the step that made the data and that also generated leading zeros in the CSV file.

I suspect that something down stream from SAS is removing the leading zeros for you.  For example if you double click on a CSV file and open it with Excel then Excel will convert anything that looks like a number to a number and leading zeros will be lost.  If the goal is to use this data with Excel then export it to an XLS or XLSX file instead of a CSV file.

[CTorres]

I think you need to review the information about SAS Variables. See  SAS(R) 9.4 Language Reference: Concepts, Fourth Edition.

There are only two types of variables in SAS: numeric and character. The numeric variables are stored in 8 bytes of memory in Float-Point internal representation (Machine)

The format in SAS allows different ways to present or display in reports (human) the value stored in a numeric variable which includes dates, datetimes and times. The format does not change in any way the numeric variable.

Ctorres