Hi:
It appears to be widely accepted that the put function only produces characters and not numeric. However, I created a proc format where I used the procedure to assign numbers within the range 1-100 into 4 different groups which I called 1,2,3,4 (kind of like quartiles). When I was done, I wanted to create a new variable which would then add up all these numbers to obtain ranking. No matter what I tried, the numbers coming out of my calculations made little sense until I used the put function writing it as
var1 = put (old_variable, name_of_value_in_proc_format) and miraculously, this worked and I got the numeric output that I wanted.
can anyone help me square this with the widespread notion that put only produces characters ? Thanks
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