thanks again, that's the way i'm using the metadata's sheets when i need to create a table, but in this case i'm using them with a different purpose.  the data table is the result of a merge between a dinamic number of tables (it can be 2 or 1000). what i want to do is to check if ther's any duplicates by key, if duplicates are presents then in the metadata i have described the weight by attributes coming from each source table. the one with heavier weight overwrite the others wich need to be saved into a dump table for future tracking, the issue here is that the weight are listed by attribute and not by source table.   ... View more

hi,  i want to load a table wich has (at the moment) 77 variables and 6 observations into a bidimentional array because i have to filter every single combination of the two dimensions in the table with a specific rule mapped into another table. In order to do so, i have to read both the field and the rule and i have to do it dynamically because both tables may vary in both dimentions (nrows,ncols). the only way that i've been able to think to solve it is by using arrays.  the input table has all char attributes but their lenght range from 1 to 200.  the rules table has 5 variables,  1 is a key while the combination of the remainings gives out the rules. variables of the data table are the keys in the rules table. i have almost no experience in sas so any help would be appreciated. thanks for the help.   ... View more

thanks a lot,  just another question, do you have any suggestion on how to load a table into those arrays? my table has 6 rows and 77 columns there are 2 problems:  -even if the columns are all char they have different length, someone is  more than 8char long; -the macrovariable compile the array with 6*77=462 but they appear to be all cols instead of rows*cols.     my code is looking like this   proc sql; select * into : DISNEY_CHAR separated by '" "' from char_by_season; quit; data DOGS_IN_DISNEY; array dogs[&n_rows.,&n_cols.] "&DISNEY_CHAR."; /*where n_rows=6 and n_cols=77 */ do r=1 to 6; do c=1 to 77; if dogs[r,c] in("Goofy","Pluto") then output; end; end; run;   ... View more

does it works on multidimentional arrays too?  let's suppose i've got    data want; array two_dim_array[&N_rows,&N_cols] &col1. &col2. .... &colN.; run;   will it works or there are other metod to create them? ... View more