Date:         Tue, 26 Aug 2003 08:28:33 -0700
Reply-To:     "Choate, Paul@DDS" <pchoate@DDS.CA.GOV>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Choate, Paul@DDS" <pchoate@DDS.CA.GOV>
Subject:      Re: Question about sort..
Comments: To: Nagakumar Sridhar <nsridhar@ATHEROGENICS.COM>
Content-Type: text/plain

Kumar -

I'd guess it's the leading bytes of your Quest field that are getting you
into trouble.  Probably embedded blanks or tabs.

Something like this could strip off leading non-numerics:

Drop Okay;
Okay='n';
Do until (Okay='y');
  If '0' le substr(Quest,1,1) le '9' then Okay='y';
  Else Quest=substr(Quest,2);
End;

Note if you have more than 9 questions then they all need to be two digits
to sort correctly ... 01, 02, 03, ... 10, 11, 12 ... 99

HTH

Paul Choate
DDS Data Extraction
(916) 654-2160

-----Original Message-----
From: Nagakumar Sridhar [mailto:nsridhar@ATHEROGENICS.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 7:30 AM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Question about sort..

Hi:



            I am trying to do a listing.  In the dataset is a field
called quest which has various questions.  Each question starts with a
number ("1. Did ...?" ,"2. Is the patient.." and so on.)  Everytime I
run the report, all the 1's (question 1's) get bunched up at the bottom
of the report.  The remaining questions are listed in order.  Any ideas
on how to straighten this out would be greatly appreciated..



Thanks and regards



Kumar Sridhar