Unusual Grouping in SAS EG

[crawfe]

Hi. This is a somewhat off-beat question but maybe someone can help...

I am creating a small table in EG and I am coming up with more Groups than I expect.

I have X's as Category. I take Y and pull the SUBSTR first two letters (looks ok); then I use the SUMMARY COUNT

and Summary Groups=X, Y(2 letter prefix) in Query Builder.

Instead of the expected three line output table, I get a random number of rows for AA, BB, CC.

I might have multiple group rows of AA, where X and AA all look the same! What could be happening

behind the scenes to make EG think that I have multiple groups? Are there hidden attributes?

(BTW the num. of rows is not the number of AA's).

Thanks!

Input:                                   Expected Grouped Output                

X          Y                              X                Y       Count Y             Observed:       

Grp1    AAxxdfd                   Grp1         AA          14           Grp1    AA      7

Grp1    AAfjroeo                   Grp1         BB           7           Grp1    AA     3

Grp1    AAkfirishf                  Grp1         CC          2           Grp1    AA     4

   etc.....                                                                              Grp1   BB     5

Grp1    BBdieisjd                                                                Grp1   BB    2

Grp1    BBfjruspw                                                                  etc.

   etc....

Grp1    CCkfiriusd

Grp1    CCforjhdhs

   etc....

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

1. Either you have invisible characters of some kind - use COMPRESS() to try and remove them
2. You have a format applied to a group variable and SQL doesn't honour formats when doing summaries. You need to use a summary TASK instead of query builder in that case or apply the format explicitly in Query Builder.

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@crawfe wrote:

Hi. This is a somewhat off-beat question but maybe someone can help...

I am creating a small table in EG and I am coming up with more Groups than I expect.

I have X's as Category. I take Y and pull the SUBSTR first two letters (looks ok); then I use the SUMMARY COUNT

and Summary Groups=X, Y(2 letter prefix) in Query Builder.

Instead of the expected three line output table, I get a random number of rows for AA, BB, CC.

I might have multiple group rows of AA, where X and AA all look the same! What could be happening

behind the scenes to make EG think that I have multiple groups? Are there hidden attributes?

(BTW the num. of rows is not the number of AA's).

Thanks!

Input:                                   Expected Grouped Output                

X          Y                              X                Y       Count Y             Observed:       

Grp1    AAxxdfd                   Grp1         AA          14           Grp1    AA      7

Grp1    AAfjroeo                   Grp1         BB           7           Grp1    AA     3

Grp1    AAkfirishf                  Grp1         CC          2           Grp1    AA     4

   etc.....                                                                              Grp1   BB     5

Grp1    BBdieisjd                                                                Grp1   BB    2

Grp1    BBfjruspw                                                                  etc.

   etc....

Grp1    CCkfiriusd

Grp1    CCforjhdhs

   etc....

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[crawfe]

Thanks. This got me on the right track. I used STRIP and it worked.

The Grp1's should have been from a pull-down list (no extra blanks).

Now I have to check the source. GIGO. Thanks!