Cody’s Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS® Software

Using Informats to Check for Invalid Values

PROC FORMAT is also used to create informats. Remember that formats are used to control how variables look in output or how they are classified by such procedures as PROC FREQ. Informats modify the value of variables as they are read from the raw data, or they can be used with an INPUT function to create new variables in the DATA step. User-defined informats are created in much the same way as user-defined formats. Instead of a VALUE statement that creates formats, an INVALUE statement is used to create informats. The only difference between the two is that informat names can only be seven characters in length. (Note: For those curious readers, the reason is that informats and formats are both stored ...