SAS Certification Prep Guide, 4th Edition

Reading Repeating Blocks of Data

The Basics of Reading Repeating Blocks of Data

Consider this example data. Each record in the file Tempdata contains three blocks of data. Each block contains a date followed by the day's high temperature in a small city located in the southern United States.

Figure 21.1 Raw Data File Tempdata

You could write a DATA step that reads each record and creates three different Date and Temp variables.

Figure 21.2 Three Date and Temp Variables

Alternatively, you could create a separate observation for each block ...