@jonatan_velarde wrote:
Baller, i appreciate a lot your contribution, could you help me to learn this mwthodology please??? if you could send me some information to delsolarvelarde@gmail.com, or an example i will reproduce it.
Thank you very much
Basic steps are very easy:
1) Find or create a basic CSV file.
2) Either use Proc Import code or the SAS file data import wizard for a CSV delimited file.
3) Look in the log.
There should be program with an infile statement describing the options used, Informat and Format statements, an Input statement and two lines related to checking if you have critical errors.
The Informats will tell you how SAS read a specific variable. If you thought it shoud be numeric and is character then you either have the Guessingrows value too small or something other than numeric values in the data.
If I want to consider longer character values, a common item, consider what is read. Your example data may have the longest value for a First Name to be 7 characters but you know that isn't likely to be long enough in other files, so increase the Informat and Format to a larger value such as $15. (I typically use $20 for first and middle names and $30 for last but your data may differ).
If a variable you thought was a date but gets read as a simple number (likely best32. or similar) look at your values. A "date" of 20140728 doesn't trigger the "guessing" rules of SAS to think of it as a date that a value like 07/28/2014 would. But you could change the Informat to YYMMDD8. to read as a date (and assign a date format for that variable that you like).
This is especially critical if you use "dates" with 2 digit years especiall if not at the end. For instance what date is 01/03/05 ? This could be Month first, Day of month first, or year first depending on data source.
The details are related to INPUT, INFILE, INFORMAT statements predominately.
