The WHERE clause in SAS is a powerful mechanism for selecting observations as you read or write a data set. The WHERE clause supports many operators, including the IN operator, which enables you to compactly specify multiple conditions for a categorical variable. A common use of the IN operator is
Tag: SAS Programming
SAS formats are flexible, dynamic, and have many uses. For example, you can use formats to count missing values and to change the order of a categorical variable in a table or plot. Did you know that you can also use SAS formats to recode a variable or to bin
I'm addicted to you. You're a hard habit to break. Such a hard habit to break. — Chicago, "Hard Habit To Break" Habits are hard to break. For more than 20 years I've been putting semicolons at the end of programming statements in SAS, C/C++, and Java/Javascript. But lately I've been
Every beginning SAS programmer learns the simple IF-THEN/ELSE statement for conditional processing in the SAS DATA step. The basic If-THEN statement handles two cases: if a condition is true, the program does one thing, otherwise the program does something else. Of course, you can handle more cases by using multiple
Last week I analyzed 12 million records of taxi cab transactions in New York City. As part of that analysis, I used a DATA step view to create a new variable, which was the ratio of the tip amount to the fare amount. A novice SAS programmer told me that
One of the first things SAS programmers learn is that SAS data sets can be specified in two ways. You can use a two-level name such as "sashelp.class" which uses a SAS libref (SASHELP) and a member name (CLASS) to specify the location of the data set. Alternatively, you can
A dummy variable (also known as indicator variable) is a numeric variable that indicates the presence or absence of some level of a categorical variable. The word "dummy" does not imply that these variables are not smart. Rather, dummy variables serve as a substitute or a proxy for a categorical
Novice SAS programmers quickly learn the advantages of using PROC SORT to sort data, followed by a BY-group analysis of the sorted data. A typical example is to analyze demographic data by state or by ZIP code. A BY statement enables you to produce multiple analyses from a single procedure
Parameters in SAS procedures are specified a list of values that you manually type into the procedure syntax. For example, if you want to specify a list of percentile values in PROC UNIVARIATE, you need to type the values into the PCTLPTS= option as follows: proc univariate data=sashelp.cars noprint; var
I began 2016 by compiling a list of popular articles from my blog in 2015. This "People's Choice" list contains many interesting articles, but some of my personal favorites did not make the list. Today I present the "Editor's Choice" list of articles that deserve a second look. I've grouped