Chris,
1. As people have talked me through this, I now realize that I will never have a numeric variable that will need to go through this transformation, so I'm done with numeric variables. I just need to try to work my way through character values.
2. The "001-101-101" was not an example. I was just showing in a reply that I would look for a subject in that manner in order to manually change the data the DM changed. I'm not trying to keep leading zeroes in SUBJID, because you're right, SAS does keep that in the proper format. It's SITEID that is just "001" that gets truncated to "1".
3. Don't worry about it. Many other respondents seem to be up to speed, and we'll get through this.
Ok, I'll leave it here then.
Let me re-emphasize this though:
You have to decide on a format that the variables must follow, and enforce this format.
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