How to change Data Type?

[izaretsky]

Hi. I am newbe in SAS.
I ran into the following problem and cannot find an answer.

I am downloading .csv file into new SAS table.

Column Col_1 becomes a string($15.) automatically because
values are: 1.223 or 0.45 or 'N/A' or 'XXX'.
I understand this OK.

I need to come up with the table that has Col_1 with number format where only float values are included.

All rows that do not have proper data ('N/A', 'XXX') should be deleted or not included.

My question is: How to do it in SAS?
It would be nice if you provide some kind of samle...

I appriciate your help.
Thanks.

 

[ChrisW75]

There's a couple of ways of doing this. The simplest (but not necessarily best) is this:-

  col_1_fixed = input(col_1,10.3);

This will generate warnings where col_1 contains things that aren't numbers though, and I dislike that.
The alternative is this:-

  if col_1 not in('N/A','XXX') then
     col_1_fixed = input(col_1,10.3);

which will skip the errors, leaving missing values in col_1_fixed for those bad values.
To drop records which have invalid values do this:-

  if col_1 not in('N/A','XXX') then
     col_1_fixed = input(col_1,10.3);
  else delete;

Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.