RW9 You are exactly correct. I am trying to emulate a looping process as I would use in other languages. My approach, looping thru the dataset and being able to pass data value to variables in any data type / format is logical an intuitive for me. I did not understand what you just explained and now, I am starting to get it. What I am trying to do is relatively simple. I could send some data in excel but am under the impression that you don't like excel files, even it is .xlsx (vs xlsm). If Excel .xlsx OK (no macros contained) I could attach 100 records of sample data. I don't know how to write code to accually generate the data. Here is a some simple data example of what I am trying to do. Step 1. Daily_Loan_file.txt (no files are gernerated on weekend). ---------> imported to a sas table / dataset. Step 2. Here are the key fields in the SAS table (Comment: I can change the date format to date9. or other formats if helpful). Table #1 Loan_Number *(n8.) Source_Text_Tile (Char40) Source_Date (Char10) Source_Date_Dte (MMDDYY10.) 125 Loan_Detail 01012016.txt 010116 01/01/16 125 Loan_Detail 01042016.txt 010416 01/04/16 125 Loan_Detail 01052016.txt 010516 01/05/16 125 Loan_Detail 01062016.txt 010616 01/06/16 125 Loan_Detail 01072016.txt 010716 01/07/16 125 Loan_Detail 01082016.txt 010816 01/08/16 Step 3. Summarize the first dataset into another that looks liks this (I used Min / MAX to do this easily). Table #2 LN_NBR First_Day Last_Day No_Days count_Files No_Work_Days 125 01/01/2016 01/08/2016 8 6 6 <----------- This is the number that I am trying to calculate because, if the file count doesn't equal the no_Work_Days, I know that I am either: 1. Missing a file (txt) or 2. The loan dropped from the system for a day or 2 or 10 days, and then is re-instates. I want to identify the broken chains. If the file count was 4 and the work days is 6, I know something is wrong. The first table (before summarized) has 5,000,000 records (Jan16-Jul16). Table #2 has 117,000 loans so I have 117,000 workdays to calculate. The code that you gave me does the calculation perfectly. How do I go from hard codes dates to passing 114,0000 values thru the calculation. I appreciate your hanging in there with me! I working with a couple of 15 year SAS developers and they couldn't instinctively tell me how to do this or fix my code. PS - If you have code that you can run against a dataset to generate the data I could trry to get the code that produces the data. "Post some examples of this original data - as a datastep so e have something to work with - my original code was based on the assumption you had a dataset, so that is where we need to start." Screen Shot of Table 2 attached with date9. format LET me know what else I can send.
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