My article about the difference between CLASS variables and BY variables in SAS focused on SAS analytical procedures. However, the BY statement is also useful in the SAS DATA step where it is used to merge data sets and to analyze data at the group level. When you use the
When I first learned to program in SAS, I remember being confused about the difference between CLASS statements and BY statements. A novice SAS programmer recently asked when to use one instead of the other, so this article explains the difference between the CLASS statement and BY variables in SAS
Want to see my newly minted certified professional badge? Scroll down to take a peek. Yes, I managed to successfully complete the Base SAS Programmer certification exam… with, ahem, flying colors I might add. Here are my tips to tackle the Base SAS certification exam: 1. Get clear on the
Do you know what the #1 fear in North America is? Most people say fear of public speaking or fear of death, but you may just want to consider this new fear upping the charts - the fear of writing a SAS Certification exam! The real test begins before even
If Necessity is the mother of Invention, then, perhaps, the father of Automation is Laziness. Automation is all about convenience, comfort, and productivity. Why do it yourself if you can devise something to do it for you! In my previous post Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux, we learned
This article and accompanying technical white paper are written to help SAS 9 users process existing SAS 9 code multi-threaded in SAS Viya 3.3. Read the full paper, Getting Your SAS 9 Code to Run Multi-Threaded in SAS Viya 3.3. The Future is Multi-threaded Processing Using SAS® Viya® When I first began
My fear of headstand took me years to overcome. I had to learn to be safe and protect my neck. I had to learn about structurally positioning my limbs in alignment to prevent injury. I had to overcome my mental fear of being upside down which is quite different from
I've used SAS with a bunch of different REST APIs: GitHub, Brightcove, Google Analytics, Lithium, LinkedIn, and more. For most of these I have to send user/password or "secret" application tokens to the web service so that it knows who I am and what data I can retrieve. I do
If you work in a team environment, you might be accustomed to using mapped network drives for source data folders or to publish results. If you've recently moved to a SAS server environment, you might not have those mapped drives available. How can you tell? This question was posted on
While SAS program development is usually done in an interactive SAS environment (SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Display Manager, SAS Studio, etc.), when it comes to running SAS programs in a production or operations environment, it is routinely done in batch mode. Why run SAS programs in batch mode? First and
The SAS language is large. Even after 20+ years of using SAS, there are many features that I have never used. Recently it became necessary for me to learn about DICTIONARY tables in PROC SQL (and the associated SASHELP views) because I needed to programmatically obtain the text for the
Finding a pattern like a phone number or national ID number embedded in text can be difficult and time consuming.
The internet is rich with data, and much of that data seems to exist only on web pages, which -- for some crazy reason -- are designed for humans to read. When students/researchers want to apply data science techniques to analyze collect and analyze that data, they often turn to
There are so many reasons why SAS programmers love SAS -- as a matter of fact, I wrote a blog on it back in 2012. I now realize that I could've written a whole series, not just a single post. And with the recent publishing of my first book, Big Data
SAS Viya is an exciting addition to the SAS Platform, allowing you to conduct analysis faster than ever before and providing you the flexibility to utilize open source technologies and generate insights from data in any computing environment. The blog post “Top 12 Advantages of SAS Viya” does a great
Social media has brought anniversary dates to the forefront. Every day, my view of Google Photos or Facebook shows me a collection of photos from exactly some number of years ago to remind me of how good things were back then. These apps are performing the simplest of date-based math
Here's a Proc Print trick for grouped data. Suppose your data is divided into groups, such as males and females. You could sort by the grouping variable before printing, like this: Suppose you want to better emphasize the groups. You could add a BY statement, like this: OK, but, personally,
A SAS programmer wanted to display a table in which the rows have different formats. An example is shown below. The programmer wanted columns that represent statistics and rows that represent variables. She wanted to display formats (such as DOLLAR) for some variables—but only for certain statistics. For example, the
There is certainly no shortage of terrific tips and tricks in various SAS blogs from some of our most distinguished SAS in-house experts. But, there's another group of equally qualified experts who don't often get to share their expertise on this channel: our customers. So, I went on a quest to get
Have you ever seen the "Fit Summary" table from PROC LOESS, as shown to the right? Or maybe you've seen the "Model Information" table that is displayed by some SAS analytical procedures? These tables provide brief interesting facts about a statistical procedure, hence they are called factoids. In SAS, a
A SAS/IML programmer asked whether you can pass the name of a function as an argument to a SAS/IML module and have the module call the function that is passed in. The answer is "yes." The basic idea is to create a string that represents the function call and then
A ghoulish Halloween Boo to all my readers! Hope my costume freaks you out, but even if it doesn't, I’m positive PROC FREQ will in a few amazing ways! Today’s Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques class asked about the power of PROC FREQ. Since I stopped to explain some of it's benefits to
This article demonstrates a SAS programming technique that I call Kuhfeld's template modification technique. The technique enables you to dynamically modify an ODS template and immediately call the modified template to produce a new graph or table. By following the five steps in this article, you can implement the technique
Suppose you want a list of car manufacturers from the CARS dataset. Easy! Call the %CHARLIST macro from a %PUT statement, like this: The CHARLIST macro generates a list of unique values of a selected variable from a selected dataset. So does PROC FREQ. But, if you don't need statistics, the CHARLIST
Reading an external file that contains delimiters (commas, tabs, or other characters such as a pipe character or an exclamation point) is easy when you use the IMPORT procedure. It's easy in that variable names are on row 1, the data starts on row 2, and the first 20 rows
Would you like to format your macro variables? Easy! Just use the %FORMAT function, like this: What?! You never heard of the %FORMAT function? Of course not, cuz it doesn't exist! No problem. Just create it, like this: %macro format(value,format); %if %datatyp(&value)=CHAR %then %sysfunc(putc(&value,&format)); %else %left(%qsysfunc(putn(&value,&format))); %mend format; The %FORMAT
Sometimes life is just too busy, and I bet many of you feel the same way. If you’re like me, you’re playing a number of roles: employee, spouse, parent, community leader, coach and so on. With all the craziness, it’s likely we’re shortchanging another role that’s critically important to our
In a large simulation study, it can be convenient to have a "control file" that contains the parameters for the study. My recent article about how to simulate multivariate normal clusters demonstrates a simple example of this technique. The simulation in that article uses an input data set that contains
It's time to share another tip about working with ZIP files in SAS. Since I first wrote about FILENAME ZIP to list and extract files from a ZIP archive, readers have been asking for more. Specifically, they want additional details about the files that are contained in a ZIP, including
News flash: My favorite SAS code editor is SAS Enterprise Guide. However, my favorite general purpose text editor is Notepad++, and I often find myself using that tool for viewing SAS log files and for making small modifications to SAS programs. Judging from the popularity of this SAS Support Communities
