special characters in SAS

[sandipan1990]

If a value contain special character, can it be a numeric type without the use of INFORMAT/FORMAT statement?

[Kurt_Bremser]

"Special" (or any) characters can only be contained in character variables. Numbers are stored in binary 8-byte real format, how the values are displayed is controlled by the display format.

[ballardw]

You might think of providing some examples. There are SAS display formats that can display numbers with "special characters" such as currency symbols, commas, () as well as displaying numeric date and time values with / - . Plus it is possible to create custom formats that can do some truly interesting things with values.

In some cases there are also matching informats to read values from a text file that include some characters such as $ into a numeric value.