Dr. Ron Cody was a Professor of Biostatistics at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey for 26 years. During his tenure at the medical school, he taught biostatistics to medical students as well as students in the Rutgers School of Public Health. While on the faculty, he authored or co-authored over a hundred papers in scientific journals. His first book, Applied Statistics and the SAS Programming Language, was first published by Prentice Hall in 1985 and is now in its fifth edition. Since then, he has published over a dozen books on SAS programming and statistical analysis using SAS. His latest book, A Gentle Introduction to Statistics Using SAS Studio was published this year. Ron has presented numerous papers at SAS Global forums, regional conferences, as well as local user groups. He is presently a contract instructor for SAS Institute and continues to write books on SAS and statistical topics.
Wait! Don't close this window. I understand that regular expressions can be very complicated (yes, there are many books on the subject), but some basic expressions to test patterns such as zip codes or telephone numbers are not that difficult. In addition, you can sometimes use Google to search for
How many times have you entered a phone number on a web page, only to be told that you did not type it the "correct" form? I find that annoying. Don't you? In my latest book, Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques, 3rd edition, I show how to convert a phone number
There's an old song that starts out, "You Can Get Anything You Want at Alice's Restaurant." Well, maybe you are too young to know that song, but if you’re a SAS users, you’ll be glad to know that you can capture anything produced by any SAS procedure (even if the
What?!? You mean a period (.) isn't the only SAS numeric missing value? Well, there are 27 others: .A .B, to .Z and ._ (period underscore). Your first question might be: "Why would you need more than one missing value?" One situation where multiple missing values are useful involves survey data. Suppose
How many of you have been given a SAS data set with variables such as Age, Height, and Weight and some or all of them were stored as character values instead of numeric? Probably EVERYONE! Yes, we all know how to do the old "swap and drop" (rename and convert), but
SAS temporary arrays are an underutilized jewel in the SAS toolbox. I find that many beginning to intermediate SAS programmers are not familiar with temporary arrays. The good news is that there is nothing complicated about them and they are very useful. First of all, what is a temporary array?
Suppose you are using SAS Studio and the statistical task you need to perform is not a supported option or feature in SAS. I know that sounds almost impossible because the statistical tasks in SAS Studio are so awesome. But, just in case you need to tweak a program or
