Step-by-Step Programming with Base SAS 9.4, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9

Working with Character Variables

Introduction to Working with Character Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Prerequisites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

Character Variables in SAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

Input SAS Data Set for Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

Identifying Character Variables and Expressing Character Values . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Setting the Length of Character Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Handling Missing Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Reading Missing Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Checking for Missing Character Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Setting a Character Variable Value to Missing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Creating New Character Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Extracting a Portion of a Character Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Combining Character Values: Using Concatenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Saving Storage Space by Treating Numbers as Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

Learning More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

Introduction to Working with Character Variables

Purpose

In this section, you will learn how to do the following:

• identify character variables

• set the length of character variables

• align character values within character variables

• handle missing values of character variables

• work with character variables, character constants, and character expressions in SAS

program statements

129