A retain problem

[lyton80]

Please help me debug this code. This code is supposed to retain the last nonmissing element of a field.

Some of the values in one array element are carried over to the next array element eg: Gender is carried to Country so that you see F in the Country field;

data kplast;

set lapazsrt

array test $ _character_;

by Medical_Record_Number Date_Created;

length temp $50.;

do i=1 to dim(test);

retain temp "";

if  first.Medical_Record_Number then temp="";

     if missing(test(i)) then

        test(i)=strip(input(temp,$50.));

  else temp=strip(input(test(i),$50.));

  if last.Medical_Record_Number ;

end

run;

[ballardw]

Heres what your code is doing:

     Check first element of array, if missing then set to blank (which is missing for character )

     if second element isn't missing it assigns that value to temp. which is kept until reset.

     If the third element of the array is missing then it assigns the value of the second element to the third element as that is what is in temp.

It may be helpful to post a few records of input and the expected output. I also suspect the location of the the do loop may be an issue.