Hi @stancemcgraw,   As you can see from @ballardw's suggestion, this is no problem technically. But before taking a single step towards changing the IDs, I would rather take ten steps to investigate why there are duplicates (check source data, read documentation, ask co-workers, etc.).   IDs, in particular patient IDs, are crucial and must not be changed in an ad-hoc manner. They are likely to occur in several datasets and are typically used as key variables to join tables. (That is, a change in one dataset would require consistent changes in other datasets.) There is also a risk of incorrectly splitting the observations from a single patient by assigning different IDs. Age can change over time, errors in the data are possible and the same combination of Age and Sex may or may not belong to different patients.   One possible reason for duplicate IDs is that only the combination of two (or more) key variables is unique. For example, in multi-center clinical trials it is common to use the combination of center ID and patient number as a unique key on patient level. Duplicates in character variables can also result from truncation in an earlier step: What if you notice that all duplicates start with "ID-10," whereas the "ID-9..." cases are unique in a Studyid variable with length 7? ID-9998 ID-9999 ... ID-10361 ID-10370 ID-10364 ID-10372 ID-10369 ID-10375 ... View more

I think this is identical to a previous question you asked recently... Given that diseases aren't coded cleanly, I'd definitely recommending using the dynamic approach instead. 1. Separate out terms into individual rows (data step) 2. Clean them up here for the issues mentioned in your second post. 3. Add an indicator variable to get the 1 4. Flip the clean version wide using PROC TRANSPOSE ... View more

@stancemcgraw  Since you already have the number of days in character strings, give this a try. data have; input hlos $31.; datalines; 2.293055555555555556 8.490277777777777 8.0291667 ; run; data want; set have; hlos_numeric = round(input(hlos, 12.4), 1); run; (Also, I believe your second example would round off to 8 days, not 9.) ... View more

Excel stores time as fraction of a day. So just multiple by 24 hours. data have; input arrival $20.; cards; .73194444444 .14652777778 .34444444444 .3 ; data want; set have; time = '24:00't * input(arrival,32.); format time tod5.; run; Results: Obs arrival time 1 .73194444444 17:34 2 .14652777778 03:31 3 .34444444444 08:16 4 .3 07:12 ... View more

To change the string values to date values first convert to a number and then adjust for the difference in how Excel and SAS count dates.  Then you can attach any date type format you want to have the values display in a human readable way. date = input(doa,32.)+'30DEC1899'd ; format date date9.;   ... View more