I'd be willing to bet money your strings are not 100% the same due to being case sensitive. remember sas is case sensitive, this includes its joins. Example Data person;      infile datalines delimiter=','; input namekey $ firstvar; datalines; John,1 Mary,2 ; run; Data person1;      infile datalines delimiter=','; input namekey $ secondvar; datalines; JOHN,1 ; run; proc sort data=person; by namekey; run; proc sort data=person1; by namekey; run; data didntwork; merge person(in=a) person1(in=b); by namekey; if a=1 and b=0; run; This process will return a dataset that has BOTH John and Mary, because neither of these values exist in the other table (John doesn't exist, but JOHN does). Do an upcase on your fields before you merge and see if that fixes it. If you are 100% positive that your cases are the same, then what you are describing cannot happen in sas by the definition of merges. If it is, append some of your actual data for us to confirm, and then follow along with SAS support. Brandon ... View more

Hi. Thanks for the response. I will give answers to your statement the best I can. So I am running sas on a local machine, the server says "local". What you mention in your third pararaph (using the explicit pass thorugh query) is actually what I do in a large portion of my code. However, my local machine is in in the mid-west and the sql server is way over on the east coast. So running a query that takes 5 seconds in sql server turns into 3-5 minutes because of the transfer of large portions of data (lots of large comment data) over our network. (this is how I understand it, but again I have never worked with or even heard of servers until about a year ago, and am still very new to this subject). In order to get around this problem, I had a VM set up in the same location as our servers, and then I had base sas installed on the VM. Now when I run a job to return results to sas from the sql server database it runs a LOT quicker, and it seemed to fix this problem. However I have heard that you can install SAS on a server (which I do not have), and I would think that programs run from this would theoritically be faster since a server has greater resources than a local machine. Is the following statement correct? "Sas on a server is just a copy of sas installed on whatever computer the server is hosted on", and then there is a way to log into the server and run jobs from the sas on it? If so, how does one do this? I guess a high level paper on how servers work, and how sas works on a server compared to sas installed on a local machine would help a lot, I just cannot find a paper that goes over this at a very beginning level I do not have a sas server (it is just sas stalled on a local machine), however I have a VM that has SAS installed on it that I often schedule jobs from using bat files. I am running windows Xp. I do not have enterprise guide. Please let me know if any other answers might be helpful, and thanks for your time! ... View more

I was trying to say exactly the same thing as Ksharp, however I guess he said it much more "clearly" than I did. You could also do the following data test2; infile datalines truncover; input type $5. color $6.; datalines; DAISYYELLOW; RUN; Is your question what is different between what K Sharp said, and what you have written? And again, another way to do this is column inputed which is why I also suggested it. Brandon ... View more

These both return the exact same thing, and it is the thing I have listed several times above. Type would be Daisy, and color would be blank. You are using LIST input, which assumes a delimiter, and you have no delimiter, therefore your second observation is becoming blank. An Informat is the way to read in the data and a format is the way to display data. For character data it is not that relevent, as a format and informat just change the length of the variables to be read in and then displayed (which you are inherently doing in your input and length statements). Read through the document you yourself linked for list input and hopefully that will help you understand how this is working. Also, there are numerous good books on learning sas that have programming examples in them, I would suggest one of these as well (that's how I learned). ... View more

My statment is almost an exact copy of the paper statement, so I am not sure what you mean by it not matching. When you use the : identifier, it will scan through your observation until ANY of the following happens after which it stops. First: it reads  the length of the specified input statement, in your case 5 characters. Second, it comes to a delimiter as defined by the delimiter option (default is a space), third, it reads the end of the variable (variable is length 5, but only 3 characters are found). In your example you only have 1 variable since you do not have a delimiter. Therefore, using ANY form of input statements besides column input is going to leave the color variable blank. All you are doing with specifying lengths the way you are is telling sas when to stop the reading of the first variable. I actually specified what sas was doing earlier in my post dated "May 7, 2013 1:31 PM".  I will repost it below with a little more explanation, but again let me know if I am not answering your question. Your original post used input to say "Grab 2 variables from the following data source (datalines), that are seperated by a Space delimiter". "For the first Variable, I read in DAISYYELLOW, however you tell me its length is only 5, therefore I remove everything after the fifth Btye.. AKa everything after Daisy".  "I then move onto the next data point, as determined by the space delimiter..."  "You do not have another datapoint, therefore I set Color to Blank, and finish". Does that make sense and answer your question? ... View more

No, this would give the same results as the query above. The colon modifier tells the system to read UNTIL it finds a delimiter (which you don't have) or until it reaches the maximum length specified. So in your case, it would read in the word "DAISYYELLOW" as one observation, and then it would stop reading when it got to a length of 5. However you have no seperator between your words, so it would not know to assign YELLOW to your color. You CANNOT split words up using input statments because it assumes a delimiter. You have to use column list input, which is different. If your goal was to read in the data, and always break it at the 5th datapoint, and then everything after that gets put into the next variable, this is what you could do. DATA TEST1; INFILE DATALINES TRUNCOVER; INPUT TYPE $1-5 COLOR  $6-11; DATALINES; DAISYYELLOW ; Note your second variable would stop at the 11th spot, and anything after that would not be read in (unless you increase its length). Is this what you wanted? I am still not clear on exactly what you need! ... View more

Sorry I'm not fully following you. Are you saying you have data that is a mix of delimited and column informatted values, and you want to be able to delimit them accordingly? Aka you have data like below. Value  KevinGreen New,Blue And you want your final dataset to be... Value                    Value2 Kevin                    Green New                      Blue Let me know if I am reading your comments correctly. ... View more

This will return one row, with the variable TYpe equal to DAISY, and the variable color equal to Blank. You are putting one variable "DAISYYELLOW" into the variable "type", however you are specifying that its length is 5, therefore you are truncating its length to 5. You are then setting the Color variable to null. If you want both variables to populate "correctly" put a space between them. ... View more