use of substr for numerical values

[bbprakash]

Thank you Mr. Chris.

Could you please tell me the use of substr function for numerical values is it same as for charecters. Here is example
data work.AreaCodes;
Phonenumber=3125551212;
Code='('!!substr(Phonenumber,1,3)!!')';
run;

answer is ( 3).

 

[dblan]

bbprakash,

There might be a better way, but this worked for me.

data test;
Phonenumber=3125551212;
Code=input(substr(put(Phonenumber,10.),1,3),10.);
run;

It converts the number to character, substrings it, then converts it back to a number.

You can drop the "input(" and ",10.)" if you are ok with the results being characater.

 

[ChrisW75]

No, you can't use substr with numeric data. If you run the code you included above, you'll get a message like this:-
NOTE: Numeric values have been converted to character values at the places given by:

What you should do is convert the data to text as Dblan showed above.

Also, for things like telephone numbers, you should use a text field anyway, not a numeric. Numeric fields only have a maximum of 8 bytes to store the number. Once the number gets above a certain magnitude, it starts suffering from rounding issues. For actual numeric data this possibly isn't such a big deal, however a telephone number that has been rounded to the nearest 3 is totally useless. This also applies to account numbers, credit card numbers, and in fact, I'd say ANY number which is a code rather than a value should be stored as a character field.
I have hit upon this issue before, and it's difficult to track down.


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