PROC TABULATE in 9.4 M3 changes var name

[fred777]

So I ran this little piece of code under SAS9.4 M0 and also under M3 and get a different name for the colpctsum variable!

proc tabulate data=sashelp.cars out=fred;

   var horsepower;

   class origin;

   table origin,horsepower*colpctsum;

run;

Under M0 the var name is: Horsepower_PctSum_0

Under M3 the var name is: Horsepower_PctSum_0_Horsepower

This is very unfortunate and is causing us a lot of grief!

Is there anything in the release notes that refers to this new behaviour?

Thanks

[Reeza]

I would definitely contact tech support with this question, if you haven't already. 

[bstrac]

We just upgraded from 9.4M2 to 9.4M4 and experienced the same column naming issue when using PROC TABULATE between versions.

I know it has been a long time since this post was created but did you find anything out from tech support?

[ChrisHemedinger]

Here's a SAS note that describes the change.  It was intentional -- to help with name collisions.  But unfortunately it broke your process.

More documentation/explanation in this Usage Note 45710: Naming convention for statistics in an output data set created by PROC TAB....

Here is a brute-force SAS macro program -- which I dug out of a Tech Support track and which you should definitely test before using in production -- that renames the variables back to the old style, trimming the underscore-number suffix.

%macro myrename(dsn=&syslast);
  %let lib=%scan(&syslast,1,%str(.));
  %let mem=%scan(&syslast,2,%str(.));
  proc sql  noprint;
  /* generate a command line : RENAME oldname=newname */
   select catt('rename',' '!!name,'=',substr(name,1,length(name)-index(reverse(trim(name)),'_'))) into:renamelist separated by ";"
   from sashelp.vcolumn where libname=upcase("&lib.") and memname=upcase("&mem.") and (lowcase(name) like '%_pctsum_%' OR lowcase(name) like '%_pctn_%' );
  /* execute this command in proc datasets */
  proc datasets lib=&lib nolist;    modify &mem;    &renamelist;  run;quit;
%mend myrename;
%myrename;