Have you ever tried to pass comma-delimited values to SAS macro or to a SAS macro function? How can SAS distinguish commas separating parameters or arguments from commas separating parts of the values? Passing comma-delimited value as an argument to a SAS macro function Let’s say you want to extract
I was sitting in a model railroad club meeting when one of our more enthusiastic young members said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could make a computer simulation, with trains going between stations and all. We could have cars and engines assigned to each train and timetables and…" So,
An informat helps you read data into a SAS data set. SAS supports more than 100 informats. The most common informats are related to dates and times and make it easy to read an input string such as 28JAN2001 and convert it to a SAS date such as 15003. Yet
One of my favorite parts of summer is a relaxing weekend by the pool. Summer is the time I get to finally catch up on my reading list, which has been building over the year. So, if expanding your knowledge is a goal of yours this summer, SAS Press has
"There's a way to do it better - find it." - Thomas A. Edison When it comes to SAS coding, this quote by Thomas A. Edison is my best advisor. Time permitting, I love finding better ways of implementing SAS code. But what code feature means “better” – brevity, clarity
Want to learn SAS programming but worried about taking the plunge? Over at SAS Press, we are excited about an upcoming publication that introduces newbies to SAS in a peer-review instruction format we have found popular for the classroom. Professors Jim Blum and Jonathan Duggins have written Fundamentals of Programming
Two sayings I’ve heard countless times throughout my life are “Work smarter, not harder,” and “Use the best tool for the job.” If you need to drive a nail, you pick up a hammer, not a wrench or a screwdriver. In the programming world, this could mean using an existing
This blog post could be subtitled "To Catch a Thief" or maybe "Go ahead. Steal this blog. I dare you."* That's because I've used this technique several times to catch and report other web sites who lift the blog content from blogs.sas.com and present it as their own. Syndicating blog
Whether you are a strong believer in the power of dividing by zero, agnostic, undecided, a supporter, denier or anything in between and beyond, this blog post will bring all to a common denominator. History of injustice For how many years have you been told that you cannot divide by
A SAS programmer posted an interesting question on a SAS discussion forum. The programmer wanted to iterate over hundreds of SAS data sets, read in all the character variables, and then do some analysis. However, not every data set contains character variables, and SAS complains when you ask it to
In automated production (or business operations) environments, we often run SAS job flows in batch mode and on schedule. SAS job flow is a collection of several inter-dependent SAS programs executed as a single process. In my earlier posts, Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux and Let SAS write
The SAS Learning post has merged with the SAS Users blog to provide you with all the training, certification, books, events, and programming tips you need.
SAS has worked with our exam delivery partners to integrate a live lab into an exam, which can be delivered anywhere, anytime, on-demand.
Regular expressions are a powerful method for finding specific patterns in text. The syntax of regular expressions is intimidating, but once you've solved a few pattern-recognition problems with regex, you'll never go back to your old methods.
Recently, I worked on a cybersecurity project that entailed processing a staggering number of raw text files about web traffic. Millions of rows had to be read and parsed to extract variable values. The problem was complicated by the varying records composition. Each external raw file was a collection of
SAS Press author Matt Windham shows you how to use the SAS procedure PROC HTTP to grab raw data from a website.
SAS supports direct integration for Git from Base SAS (via functions), SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Studio, and SAS Data Integration Studio. Read this article to learn how to use Git more effectively in your SAS processes.
Now is your chance to learn even more about SAS hash tables with four additional articles on the subject.
My New Year's resolution: “Unclutter your life” and I hope this post will help you do the same. Here I share with you a data preparation approach and SAS coding technique that will significantly simplify, unclutter and streamline your SAS programming life by using data templates. Dictionary.com defines template as
Last year, I wrote more than 100 posts for The DO Loop blog. Of these, the most popular articles were about data visualization, SAS programming tips, and statistical data analysis. Here are the most popular articles from 2018 in each category. Data Visualization Visualize repetition in song lyrics: In one
Good news -- the SAS program that you wrote and put into production 10 years ago still works. Hey, it's SAS, so you probably take that for granted. But are those techniques from 2008 still the best way to accomplish your task? SAS 9.4, first released in 2013 and now
You might know that you can use the ODS SELECT statement to display only some of the tables and graphs that are created by a SAS procedure. But did you know that you can use a WHERE clause on the ODS SELECT statement to display tables that match a pattern?
SAS is launching the SAS Student Series, which bundles thousands of dollars’ worth of training and certification materials into an affordable package for university students and recent graduates.
This blog post outlines how to create your own CAS functions using the CAS Language. It also includes a partial list of both CASL built-in and common functions for reference.
A useful feature in PROC SGPLOT is the ability to easily visualize subgroups of data. Most statements in the SGPLOT procedure support a GROUP= option that enables you to overlay plots of subgroups. When you use the GROUP= option, observations are assigned attributes (colors, line patterns, symbols, ...) that indicate
Hash tables are a very powerful and flexible data structure. Most SAS applications of hash tables focus on just one of their many powerful facilities: table lookup. Hash tables are a fantastic table lookup tool and their use for that should never be diminished. However, hash tables can do so
In many movies, there is often a scene where the star says "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way" (and the hard way usually involves quite a bit of pain). So it is with interrogations ... and so it is with writing SAS code! Today I'm
A programmer recently asked a question on a SAS discussion forum about design matrices for categorical variables. He had generated a design matrix by using PROC GLMMOD and wanted to use the design columns in a subsequent procedure. However, the columns were named COL1, COL2, COL3,..., so he couldn't tell
SAS batch jobs can generate many log files that accumulate over time. In this post, we present a SAS program that cleans up old log files on your system.
The Base SAS DATA step has been a powerful tool for many years for SAS programmers. But as data sets grow and programmers work with massively parallel processing (MPP) computing environments such as Teradata, Hadoop or the SAS High-Performance Analytics grid, the data step remains stubbornly single-threaded. Welcome DS2 –
