Round numbers and getting rid of extra zeroes

[ilikesas]

Hi,

suppose I have the following table PARMS:

parameter	esimate
a	14.72344
b	-0.00015
c	0.74911
d	-0.00986

using the round function I rounded each value to 3 decimal places and got the following table PARMS2:

data parms2;
set parms;
estimate= round(estimate,.001); 
run;

parameter	estimate
a	14.72300
b	0
c	0.74900
d	-0.01000

Now I want to get rid of the extra zeroes - I want to leave only the integer part and the first 3 decimals. I thought just getting rid of the 2 right-most numbers using the following code:

data parms3;
set parms2;
estimate=substr(estimate,1,length(estimate)-2);
run;

But the result PARMS3 is a mess:

parameter	estimate
a	14.70000
b	.
c	0.70000
d	0

Could you please help me?

Thank you!

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

SUBSTR is intended for characters you have a numeric variable.

Why not use a format instead?

format estimate 12.3;

[ballardw]

Note that using a format like 12.3 can remove the need for a separate rounding step and may prevent some odd behaviors involving multiple rounding.

Please see:

data _null_;
   x= 123.78445;
   r1=round(x,0.0001);
   r2 = round(r1,0.001);
   r3 = round(r2,0.01);
   put x= 12.4 r1= x=12.3 r2= x=12.2 r3=;
run;