The OUTSTATS dataset created by PROC COMPARE includes summary statistics for only numeric columns, eg. N, MEAN, STD, NDIF. While the MEAN, MIN, MAX, STD, STDERR etc values are not applicable to character columns, N and NDIF are.
The OUTSTATS data is very helpful to very quickly get a sense of the magnitude of differences between the BASE and COMPARE datasets. e.g. outstats = column_diffs ( where = ( _type_ = 'NDIF' and _base_ ne 0 )).
The ODS table output produced by "ods table comparesummary = blah" is just the printed output that must be parsed, an untenable solution.
Please add N and NDIF to the OUTSTATS data for character columns.
