If you are not sure why you are running a DO WHILE or %DO %WHILE loop then it will be a lot harder to figure out if you have coded an infinite loop or not.   Note that the accepted answer is not the right answer to the question.   The right answer is that you need to make sure that the condition will terminate.  So in the case of DO WHILE() that at some point the condition will be false.    If you are not sure if the condition will ever be met then in a data step the you can actually combine WHILE() , or UNTIL(), with an incremental DO to set an upper bound on the number of iterations.  That way the loop will stop either when the condition is met or the looping limit is exceeded. do loop=1 to 1000 while (i <= 6) ; .... end; ... View more

Thank you, FreelanceReinhard! Great explanation! Actually I did use round function to the concerned variables in both data when making comparisons, but this is the aftermath solution when the issues appear. If I could prevent this kind of issue from happening at the beginning when I extract a data from Snowflake, I would be happy not going back to repeat the process by applying the solution because this issue is not a real issue actually but may give you a surprise for having a overwhelming long list of data inconsistency, and repeating a process sometime is a very time consuming step in a project having many steps. ... View more

This issue was resolved and I adopted the solution suggested by novinosrin.    When dealing with strings containing words and special characters, a macro variable has some limitations. Since a macro variable is set to be used dynamically, and it is called by various programs including macro programs, it increases the complicacy of usage. Quotation marks are necessary in many functions, and the interpretation of  a macro variable can only be within a pair of double quotation marks. Therefore, to pre-assign the single quotation mark to a text value containing words and special characters is very necessary and not avoidable in some cases. This topic is intended to find a good solution that I am not aware of for this specific technical issue.   Thanks to all for valuable suggestions!   Regards, ... View more

Okay. I would bypass this approach if there was no solution for it. Thank you so much, KurtBremser ! ... View more

It can be accomplished now with my task of importing .TXT files with head lines and tail lines.   Thanks for everyone's help! ... View more

Thank you, ChrisNZ! This is the solution I am looking for.   I just change 'CODE' to 'ID' as I want to group the count of dates by ID. count(unique case when DEPT="ETA" then cats(DATE,ID) end) as EVENTS_CNT The result to have: lin_cnt  ID_cnt  CODE_cnt  EtA_CODE_cnt  envents_cnt         13         2                 3                         3                    4 ... View more

Yes, you are right. I closed all the programs and re-run the code, I got the right variable names. Also thank you for reminding me adding NOOBS option. ... View more

Hi, novinosrin,    Thank you for providing more solutions! These versatile ways will serve many kinds of scenarios. Thank you! ... View more

Tom, this is a another excellent solution! It also automatically generates the new variable names using 'type'. Thank you so much! I appreciate it. ... View more