The topic linked below has a brief explanation of the BASE option.  The accepted answer has links to the documentation, but the links are broken (possibly because they were posted 5 years ago).  Where can I find the current documentation on using the BASE option in a LIBNAME statement?   https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Base-option-in-libname-statement/m-p/298243 ... View more

I have an xlsx file that appears to be output from a SAS process.  It contains one worksheet with a table of data.  The column headers in the table of data are varnum, memname, name, label, type, length, format, and thru_dt.  All of the values in the memname column are the same string.    Question 1: I know that memname means member name, but what is a member?  Is it a library?  A variable?  A dataset?  An observation?  Does it depend on the context?   Question 2: This appears to be output from PROC CONTENTS.  Does that sound right?  If so, what does memname mean in this context? ... View more

I'm trying to use a data step to create a file, but only create it if there are records to be written to the file.  Since the data step exits when the SET statement runs and there are no more records, I though that putting the FILE statement after the SET statement would prevent the file from being created if there were no records in the dataset named in the SET statement.  However, the code below create an empty text file even when the rowcount of Work.dataset1 is zero.  Am I doing something wrong?  Why is the FILE statement executing at all?  Is what I am trying to do feasible, or should I be writing macro code?     %Let filepath = /data/file.txt; DATA _NULL_; SET Work.dataset1; FILE "&FilePath"; IF _N_ = 1 THEN DO; put 'Line 1'; put 'Line 2'; put ' '; put 'First Last DOB'; /* These are the column headers. */ END; put First ' ' Last ' ' DOB; RUN;     Thanks. ... View more

I would like to take a data set with 1 column containing distinct entries and expand it by making pairs of distinct entries.  I thought i could do this by placing a second SET statement referencing the same data set inside a DO WHILE loop, but it's not working.  The issue is that the buffer (or whatever) for the second SET statement appears to be preserved over iterations of the implicit loop of the DATA step.  Is there a way to force a SET statement to read from the first observation, regardless of the iteration of the DATA step?  My code is below with lots of PUT statements to show what's happening in the log:     data JustIndex; input ID @@; datalines; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ; run;       data pairs; set JustIndex; innerIndex = 1; put 'Before loop: ' _all_; Do while (innerIndex < _N_); put 'looping ' innerIndex; set JustIndex; ID2 = ID; output; innerIndex = innerIndex + 1; end; put 'After loop: ' _all_; run;       And here's the log for the second DATA step: Before loop: ID=1 innerIndex=1 ID2=. _ERROR_=0 _N_=1 After loop: ID=1 innerIndex=1 ID2=. _ERROR_=0 _N_=1 Before loop: ID=2 innerIndex=1 ID2=. _ERROR_=0 _N_=2 looping 1 After loop: ID=1 innerIndex=2 ID2=1 _ERROR_=0 _N_=2 Before loop: ID=3 innerIndex=1 ID2=. _ERROR_=0 _N_=3 looping 1 looping 2 After loop: ID=3 innerIndex=3 ID2=3 _ERROR_=0 _N_=3 Before loop: ID=4 innerIndex=1 ID2=. _ERROR_=0 _N_=4 looping 1 looping 2 looping 3 After loop: ID=6 innerIndex=4 ID2=6 _ERROR_=0 _N_=4 Before loop: ID=5 innerIndex=1 ID2=. _ERROR_=0 _N_=5 looping 1 looping 2 looping 3 As you can see, the DO WHILE loop runs exactly 9 times.  On the 9th time, the inner SET statement hits the end of the data set, causing the DATA step to terminate.  The point of the innerIndex < _N_ condition was to prevent the inner SET statement from ever hitting the end of the data set.       ... View more

I accidentally opened an irrelevant dataset while working on a project.  The irrelevant dataset now appears as an icon in my process flow.  Is there anyway to remove that icon?  It is not referenced by any of my programs or tasks.   My question is somewhat related to this post.   ... View more