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Programming Tips

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 31, 2012 14

The case for XCMD privileges in SAS Enterprise Guide

One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 22, 2012 12

Using a regular expression to validate a SAS variable name

Regular expressions provide a powerful method to find patterns in a string of text. However, the syntax for regular expressions is somewhat cryptic and difficult to devise. This is why, by my reckoning, approximately 97% of the regular expressions used in code today were copied and pasted from somewhere else.

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 15, 2012 1

Comparing data set schemas in SAS

The project that I'm currently working on requires several input data tables, and those tables must have a specific schema. That is, each input table must contain columns of a specific name, type, and length in order for the rest of the system to function correctly. The schema requirements aren't

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 14, 2012 7

How to get your SAS data set attributes into Excel

I'm working on a SAS programming project with a large team. Each team member is responsible for a piece of the overall system, and the "contract" for how it all fits together is The Data. For example, I've got a piece that performs some data manipulation and produces several output

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 30, 2012 8

How to get the statistics you need from SAS Enterprise Guide

If you need to calculate the mean, sum, standard deviation, or frequency count for a variable, you'll find it pretty easy to accomplish in SAS Enterprise Guide. The corresponding tasks in the menus have names like "Summary Statistics" or "One-way Frequencies". Obvious, right? Often, researchers or students have a quest

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 16, 2012 4

Listing the data sets in a library within your custom task

A SAS Professionals attendee and Twitter follower named Marco asks for help: ..struggling to find a method with custom tasks in EG to be able to list the datasets in a library, can you help please? Sure, no problem. This is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. First, make sure that you have a reference

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 6, 2012 16

Counting how many times a web link has been shared on Twitter or Facebook

Update 24Nov2015: The methods in this post no longer work for Twitter, as Twitter has discontinued support for its "share count" API that was used within the Twitter share buttons. But the Facebook method still works, and I've described a method for counting LinkedIn shares on another post. As of

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 14, 2012 8

Read a Microsoft datetime value into a SAS datetime value

A colleague was recently working with a web service that supplies some datetime values using the Microsoft Windows internal representation. He called the web service to retrieve those values (along with other data) from SAS, and he needed convert these values to SAS date-time values. The Microsoft definition for a

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 7, 2012 36

How to search your SAS Enterprise Guide project files using automation

If you are like many SAS Enterprise Guide users, you've amassed a large collection of project files (EGP files) that contain important content: programs, logs, notes, results, and more. However, to most tools and processes, the EGP file is opaque. That is, you can't see what's inside of it unless

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 22, 2012 1

Query the Windows registry within your SAS program

On the SAS-L mailing list, a participant posed this question (paraphrased): How can I tell which date format my Windows session is using: European format (with day first) versus USA format (with month first)? I'm reading in output from a Windows file listing, and need to know how to interpret

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