Any SAS Users? Good Message Board/Forum?

Factual Questions
1

I curious if there are any SAS Users out there that know of good message board/forums for programming help and discussion. I’m relatively new to it and although its a ridiculous easy language, I still come up with some questions.

Thanks.

2

I do believe those are the worst two sentances ever written.

My apologies to proof-reading people everywhere.

3

The most I ever needed was the SAS documentation, but I was doing some pretty simple stuff. Maybe that’ll help.

4

I’ve used the SAS to topple a couple regimes and had one or two pesky foreign diplomats bumped off. They were very nice about it and did excellent work but I don’t think they have message boards for those activities.

5

There’s a Usenet newsgroup **comp.soft-sys.sas ** that looks pretty active. I must remember to post there one of these days to find out how to get rid of trailing blanks when using informats.

6

Thanks.

Won’t the TRIM(LEFT(var)) remove your blanks? I don’t think you can get an informat that resizes to your variables length.

7

Thanks for the suggestion but TRIM(LEFT(var)) leaves me with one trailing blank at the end of the branch and region names. This drives me nuts. Nothing I could find in the SAS documentation works.

BRANCH = PUT(STATE,$BRCHFMT.) ;
REGION = PUT(STATE,$REGNFMT.) ;

BRANCH = TRIM(LEFT(BRANCH)) ;
REGION = TRIM(LEFT(REGION)) ;

8

I’m confused.

Say your informats $BRCHFMT. and $REGNFMT. have a length of 3 and you are storing a statecode like ‘MD’. Even if you Trim(left(‘MD’)) since you restore it in variables Branch and Region, you’ll still get a trailing space because of the informat length.

9

Me too.

STATE is a 1-2 character numeric state code that’s read in from a database.

$BRCHFMT. & $REGNFMT. take that state code, create the variables BRANCH and REGION and assign a branch and region such as Eastern Branch, Western Branch, Eastern Region, etc. (Me, I woudn’t do it this way in the first place but that’s the way my boss likes to do it and I’m stuck with it.)

When I do that, I always get a trailing blank at the end of the region and branch name.

When I add the TRIM code I’m not trying to trim STATE, I’m trying to trim the branch/region name that was applied by the informat.

10

Are you using a PROC Format to create the $BRCHFMT. and $REGNFMT.? What’s the code there?

We might just turn the SDMB into the SAS Forum I was looking for…

11

PROC FORMAT ;
‘10’ = 'ILLINOIS ’
‘12’ = 'ILLINOIS ’
‘72’ = 'ILLINOIS ’
‘13’ = 'GREAT LAKES ’
‘14’ = 'MID PLAINS ’
‘15’ = 'MID PLAINS ’
‘21’ = 'GREAT LAKES ’
‘22’ = ‘NORTHERN PLAINS’
etc.
;

Those actually have the same number of characters/spaces but the font is making it look like some have fewer. Northern Plains is the longest region name.

12

I forgot to paste in:

VALUE $REGNFMT

under the PROC FORMAT in my last post.