Thank you so much! The array did work and it will help me a lot, since I have others to rename.   ... View more

Thank you.   ... View more

Thank you both. I don't have that many tables so it will work well for me.    ... View more

I appreciate your help and apologize for not having the data step. I did use the first solution proposed on this thread and it worked for what I needed to do. I will definitely keep your idea, if I ever need it. Thank you. ... View more

It works. It is pretty amazing. I have a question though, when I look at the merged file I see that the string lengths are not set to one max length but the max for each variable for the files merged (probably), which makes sense since it is all that matters, to set to the max needed based on what you have. Thank you again. This was exactly what I needed.   ... View more

Thank you. I will try this out and let you know if it worked. It looks simple enough and it is what I was hoping to get.     ... View more

Thank you. I will be trying this out. Is there a reason why you have date variables ? It thew me off a little. The code would be easier with only "id" and "code".  I don't have to do anything with my date variables just the strings. Could I just remove the lines with the date statements?     ... View more

That would be ideal but I am not sure how to do that. I usually have spss files with the different lengths (I can't change that, our program generates these files that way), I save them in sas to clean and merge them in sas. How could I use PROC IMPORT in that case ? I have never done that.  Thank you. ... View more

Hi Tom, The flags work well for what I want to do. Thank you so much.   ... View more

They are in 2 different data sets so they are independent (the file that has the different 5 variables AND the file that has one var X with 5 key values). I am trying to rename  them both as one VAR X (because they are the same variable, only collected differently) and I need to do this so the variable X in the those 2 files match and I can merge them.   How would I separate the values out of X using a loop and array, with SCAN() ?  That is what I am thinking I need to do, but I've never done this before. Thank you !  ... View more

Yes... I thought of that also, but the example he gave was for variables a b c d e (my original question) I need to do this for only one variable now - and that is variable X that has multiple values 1 to 5. I am not sure how to adapt his suggestion to this new scenario.  a b c d e are not variables in this case, I have values 1 2 3 4 5 but all in one variable X that must be separated first and then renamed into a new value.     ... View more

Now I have another question. If I am creating values for the combinations (as I think is the best solution), my second data file that has only one Var X with multiple numbers must also be renamed (with the keys that would correspond to the combinations).    Sas is saying that X has an incorrect numeric variable for the entries (obs) with 1,3 or 2,3 and so on.   The renaming commands below do not work:   if (X =1 and X= 2) then X=6;   or    if x=1,2 then x=6   Sas does not recognize 1,2 as a correct number or the way I broke it apart in the first example.    Would an array work better here then ? If so, how can I work with these values separated by commas in var X?   My second data set looks like this (in SPSS):   Obs  VAR X 1       3 2       1,3 3       2,5 4       1,2,3,4 5       1 6       1,3   etc    and it needs to look like Obs  VAR X 1       3 2       7 3       15 4       11 5       1 6       7   Thanks again ... View more

They are not ever missing (it is either 1 or 0,  0 is not "missing" instead it is "source not used"). This variable is giving information about "sources" of documents used in one of our data sets. So we can have all 5 sources or any combination of the 5, including only one, but X is never missing, we have to have at least one source for each data entry. All we want to know is the frequency of "sources" we have in our data, what is the source most used.  Thanks. ... View more