More than a month ago I wrote a first article in response to an interesting article by Charlie H. titled Top 10 most powerful functions for PROC SQL. In that article I described SAS/IML equivalents to the MONOTONIC, COUNT, N, FREQ, and NMISS Functions in PROC SQL.

In this article, I discuss the UNIQUE functions in PROC SQL and in PROC IML.

The UNIQUE function in SQL finds the unique values of a variable. For categorical variables, it gives the levels of the variable. Charlie H. wrote a program that uses PROC SQL to count the number of levels for the Origin and Type variables in the SASHELP.CARS data set:

proc sql;
title'Unique() -- Find levels of categorical variables';
select count(unique(Origin)) as L_origin, 
       count(unique(Type)) as L_type
from sashelp.cars;
quit;

The SAS/IML language also has a UNIQUE function. The UNIQUE function always returns a row vector that contains the unique sorted values of its argument, as shown in the following statements:

proc iml;
use sashelp.cars;
read all var {Origin Type};
close sashelp.cars;
 
uOrigin = unique(Origin);
uType   = unique(Type);
print uOrigin, uType;

Because you know that the output is a row vector, you can count the number of columns by using the NCOL function, as shown below:

L_Origin = ncol(uOrigin); /** = 3 **/
L_Type   = ncol(uType);   /** = 6 **/

I think that the UNIQUE function is one of the most important functions in SAS/IML because it enables you to compute statistics for each level of a categorical variable. Furthermore, the UNIQUE/LOC technique (which is described on p. 69 of my book, Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software) is a highly useful technique that should be a part of every statistical programmer's toolbox.