Many of you know Mike Zdeb. He's a long-time SAS user and frequent presenter at SAS conferences. Zdeb is also a reviewer of many SAS Press books and author of his own SAS book, Maps Made Easy Using SAS. Zdeb contacted me after he read the May SAS Tech Report to say that he had an idea for reducing the number of steps in one of the SAS Samples in the Tips & Techniques section.

Before I give you Zdeb's emailed tip, I'll preface it with a slight caution: While this tip may be a great step saver, not everyone with Data Step experience has experience with PROC SQL – and vice versa.

If you have tips for reducing the steps to solve a problem OR you have a new way to solve an old problem, send them to me. We'll tag them tips & techniques so that everyone can find them.

With no further ado, here is Zdeb's cool tip:

Hi ... I saw this "How to Mimic the N Function for Character Variables" and looked at the SAS code ...

data temp;
  input (disp1-disp8) ($);
datalines;
1 2 . 4 5 6 7 8
. 2 3 4 5 . 7 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 2 3 . . 6 . 8
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 . 3 . 5 . 7 .
;
run;                                

proc contents data=temp out=mytemp;
run;                                

data _null_;
  set mytemp nobs=total;
  call symputx('totvar',total);
run;                                

data two;
  set temp;
  obs=&totvar;
  miss=cmiss(of disp1-disp8);
  nonmiss=&totvar-miss;
run;
proc print;
run;

So how about a shorter, more general version that gets right at the number of character variables in a dataset with one use of PROC SQL rather than with PROC CONTENTS and a data step?

It counts [only]the number of character variables since the above will not work if there are any numeric variables in the dataset [&totvar would be a count of all variables, not just character and CMISS isn't limited to character data if you tried some like CMISS (OF _ALL_)]

proc sql noprint;
select count(*) into :charvars from dictionary.columns where libname eq 'WORK' and memname eq 'TEMP' and type eq 'char'; quit;

data two;
set temp;
miss=cmiss(of _character_);
nonmiss=&charvars-miss;
run;

--

Mike Zdeb

So, here's the challenge: First, in the comments section, tell me if you know of other ways to shorten the steps in the SAS SAMPLE (already quite simple); second, send me your blog post (no more than 500 words) highlighting your super cool SAS tips & techniques.

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