I recently asked a SAS user, “Which interface do you use for SAS?” She replied, “Interface? I just install SAS and use it.” “You’re using the SAS windowing environment,” I explained, but she had no idea what I was talking about. This person is an extremely sophisticated SAS user who
Did you know that you can check a SAS macro variable to see if ODS graphics is enabled? The other day I wanted to write a SAS program that creates a graph only if ODS graphics is enabled. The solution is to check the SYSODSGRAPHICS macro variable, which is automatically
SAS formats are very useful and can be used in a myriad of creative ways. For example, you can use formats to display decimal values as a fraction. However, SAS supports so many formats that it is difficult to remember details about the format syntax, such as the default field
SAS programmers who have experience with other programming languages sometimes wonder whether the SAS language supports statements that are equivalent to the "break" and "continue" statements in other languages. The answer is yes. The LEAVE statement in the SAS DATA step is equivalent to the "break" statement. It provides a
I recently needed to solve a fun programming problem. I challenge other SAS programmers to solve it, too! The problem is easy to state: Given a long sequence of digits, can you write a program to count how many times a particular subsequence occurs? For example, if I give you
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles to help current SAS programmers add SAS Viya to their analytics skillset. In this post, SAS instructors Stacey Syphus and Marc Huber introduce you to our new Introduction to SAS Viya Programming for SAS 9 Programmers video library, designed to show SAS programmers how they can
Suppose you have several discrete variables. You want to conduct a frequency analysis of these variables and print the results, but ONLY for variables that have three or more levels. In other words, you want to conditionally display some results, but you don't know which variables satisfy the condition until
After reading my article about how to use BY-group processing to run 1000 regression models, a SAS programmer asked whether it is possible to reorder the output of a BY-group analysis. The answer is yes: you can use the DOCUMENT procedure to replay a portion of your output in any
Longtime SAS programmers know that the SAS DATA step and SAS procedures are very tolerant of typographical errors. You can misspell most keywords and SAS will "guess" what you mean. For example, if you mistype "PROC" as "PRC," SAS will run the program but write a warning to the log:
What?!? You mean a period (.) isn't the only SAS numeric missing value? Well, there are 27 others: .A .B, to .Z and ._ (period underscore). Your first question might be: "Why would you need more than one missing value?" One situation where multiple missing values are useful involves survey data. Suppose
Colors are the subject of many romantic poems and songs, but there isn't much romance to be found in their hexadecimal values. With apologies to Van Morrison: ...Skipping and a jumping In the misty morning fog with Our hearts a thumpin' and you My cx662F14 eyed girl When it comes
Suppose you create a scatter plot in SAS with PROC SGPLOT. What color does PROC SGPLOT use for the markers? If you specify the GROUP= option so that markers are colored by a grouping variable, what colors are used to represent the various groups? The following scatter plot shows the
In a previous blog, Random Sampling: What's Efficient?, I discussed the efficiency of various techniques for selecting a simple random sample from a large SAS dataset. PROC SURVEYSELECT easily does the job: proc surveyselect data=large out=sample method=srs /* simple random sample */ rate=.01; /* 1% sample rate */ run; Note:
For SAS programmers, the PUT statement in the DATA step and the %PUT macro statement are useful statements that enable you to display the values of variables and macro variables, respectively. By default, the output appears in the SAS log. This article shares a few tips that help you to
How many of you have been given a SAS data set with variables such as Age, Height, and Weight and some or all of them were stored as character values instead of numeric? Probably EVERYONE! Yes, we all know how to do the old "swap and drop" (rename and convert), but
This SAS Jedi is very excited about the SAS 9.4 M4 release, which brought many wonderful gifts just in time for Christmas. So in the interest of extending the Christmas spirit, I'm going to blog about some of my favorites! I've long loved the SAS DO statement variant which allows
SAS temporary arrays are an underutilized jewel in the SAS toolbox. I find that many beginning to intermediate SAS programmers are not familiar with temporary arrays. The good news is that there is nothing complicated about them and they are very useful. First of all, what is a temporary array?
TL; DR Free training from SAS: "SAS Programming for R Users." Check the available Live Web offerings and register for one that fits your schedule. Or use the free e-Learning version and learn at your own pace. The complete course materials are on the SAS Software GitHub space and you
As technology expands, we have a similarly increasing need to create programs that can be handed off – to clients, to regulatory agencies, to parent companies, or to other projects – and handed off with little or no modification needed by the recipient. Minimizing modification by the recipient often requires
JSON is the new XML. The number of SAS users who need to access JSON data has skyrocketed, thanks mainly to the proliferation of REST-based APIs and web services. Because JSON is structured data in text format, we've been able to offer simple parsing techniques that use DATA step and
In my earlier post about WHERE and IF statements, I announced that the DATA step debugger has finally arrived in SAS Enterprise Guide. (I admit that I might have buried the lead in that post.) Let's use this post to talk about the new debugger and how it works. First,
Do you want to create customized SAS graphs by using PROC SGPLOT and the other ODS graphics procedures? An essential skill that you need to learn is how to merge, join, append, and concatenate SAS data sets that come from different sources. The SAS statistical graphics procedures (SG procedures) enable
In the DATA step, the WHERE statement and the IF statement (a.k.a. the "subsetting IF") have similar functions. In many scenarios, they produce identical results. But new SAS programmers are taught early on that these two statements work very differently, and in important ways. To understand the differences, it helps
Using the DATASETS procedure, we can easily modify SAS variable attributes such as name, format, informat and label: proc datasets library=libref; modify table_name; format var_name date9.; informat var_name mmddyy10.; label var_name = 'New label'; rename var_name = var_new_name; quit; We cannot, however, modify fixed variable attributes such as variable type
If you obtain data from web sites, social media, or other unstandardized data sources, you might not know the form of dates in the data. For example, the US Independence Day might be represented as "04JUL1776", "07/04/1776", "Jul 4, 1776", or "July 4, 1776." Fortunately, the ANYDTDTE informat makes it
My river walk last week turned into a spectacular fall show. But if it rains this week in San Antonio, like the weatherman predicts, what will I do? In the coming days, I’ll be presenting at two user groups, one in eastern Canada in Halifax, and the other all the
SAS programmers often resort to using the X command to list the contents of file directories and to process the contents of ZIP files. In centralized SAS environments, the X command is unavailable to most programmers. NOXCMD is the default setting for these environments (disallowing shell commands), and SAS admins
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
First, if you landed on this topic because you encountered this SAS message: ERROR 180-322: Statement is not valid or it is used out of proper order. ...then I'll tell you right now: you've probably left off a semicolon in one of your SAS statements. If you're lucky, the SAS
A colleague approached me with this very important business problem: Every Friday at SAS HQ, SAS cafe staff provides a breakfast goodie in our breakrooms. Often the supplied goodie is delicious, but sometimes it's more...well...healthy. I want to know whether I should eat my breakfast before I leave home on
