Handbook of SAS DATA Step Programming

16 Handbook of SAS

®

DATA Step Programming

4 Age Num 8

5 Preg Num 8

6 Hearing Char 3

7 Income Num 8

1.4.3 The SORT Procedure

The SORT procedure is used to order the data set observations by the values

of one or more variables. In SAS, a missing value, either numeric or character,

is the smallest value. The general syntax for PROC SORT is as follows:

PROC SORT <DATA=SAS-data-set> <OUT=SAS-data-set>;

BY <DESCENDING> variable-1 <... <DESCENDING> variable-n>;

RUN;

In the PROC SORT statement, the DATA=SAS-data-set option is used to iden-

tify the input SAS data set for sorting, and the OUT=SAS-data-set option

is used to name the output data set that contains newly sorted data. If the

OUT= option is omitted, the PROC SORT procedure will re ...