SAS Support Communities

Hi "Bhpinder", basically you are doing the right thing, but yes, it can be improved. to exit a do loop use the LEAVE statement (i.e. you can drop GOTO and its target label) use 'do i=1 to dim(check);' thus bypassing hard coding the number of elements in the array further possibilities for improvement: loop exit can also be controlled on the DO statement itself, so look up DO UNTIL and DO WHILE respectively some people prefer using automatic variables (e.g. _n_) for the loop counter because _n_ is automatically dropped i.e. not written to the eventual dataset modifying _n_ does not interfere with the way _n_ gets assigned by the datastep's internal mechanisms so it can be used rather freely (Don't waste too much time thinking about this statement if its meaning is not immediately understandable. I'm sure it can be expressed much better but I'm getting to my limits here with regards to my command of the english language.) (PS: I'm not an advocate of this use of _n_ as it might confuse people for whom SAS is but one of the many tools they use.) Generally I strongly advice to bookmark SAS online documentation. My favourite (not having had access to any SAS system above 9.1.3) being - you guess it - the 9.1.3 Documentation and there especially the Language Reference Dictionary book. SAS has such a rich set of functions, formats, informats, options and statements that skimming through its pages is time well invested. Furthermore there are overview pages in this document such as Functions and CALL Routines : Functions and CALL Routines by Category that I always turn to when a voice inside me says "there must be some function, format, whatsoever that exactly does this". Kind regards Robert ... View more

Try HEADER = put(SHRCD,best.-l) ; If that works then a bunch of the assumptions that we had to make (since you provided no log) could be true. Assumptions such as SHRCD is numeric and not character So the log would have told us by mentioning 'Numeric values have been converted to character ...' "Header will have no observations" should be "Header will be blank" Happens when SHRCD is numeric and the value is per default right justified in an eight byte field of which you extract (by means of SUBSTR) position one i.e. a blank Now why would the above work without invoking function SUBSTR? That's because the length of HEADER has already been declared as one byte. (Note BTW the statement has to be "length header $1", i.e. no dot after $1 . We are declaring the length here and not assigning a format.) Transferring a longer character variable's value to a shorter variable results in the value being truncated at the shorter variable's length. Oh, and  "best.-L" means: "write out the numeric value justified left in a format optimal for the field length". Hope this heaps Robert ... View more