Retain and First.var 1

[tweaked2005]

I reviewed other post, and still can't seem to come up with a working solution.

I have a dataset similar to below:

id category
1 Fever
1 Headache
1 Nausea
1 Fever
2 Nausea
2 Accident
3 Fever
4 Accident

I want to create a new variable: "conditions" that has a concatenated list of categories by id. So for example, for id = 1, conditions = "FeverHeadacheNauseaFever"

Here is the code I'm using, but I'm not getting the right results:

data new; set old;
   by id;
   retain id conditions;
   if first.id then conditions = '';
   conditions = compress(conditions||category);
   if last.id then output;

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[shenniko]

Hi,

Try the below:-

data new;
	set old;
	Length conditions $100.;
	by id;
	retain conditions;
		if first.id then 
		conditions = category;
	else
		conditions = compress(conditions||category);
	if last.id then
		output;
run;

The problem was you were telling it to do something with the first occurrence and the last, but nothing in-between.

So the first occurrence you set the first Category, else you join the category to the retained Condition.. then finally if its the last one. output.

Hope this helps.

Shenn

 

[tweaked2005]

Yay! It worked. Thank you so much! I knew I was close.