Date:         Fri, 7 May 2004 17:22:49 -0400
Reply-To:     Venky Chakravarthy <venky.chakravarthy@PFIZER.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Venky Chakravarthy <venky.chakravarthy@PFIZER.COM>
Subject:      Re: proc compare gotcha?
Comments: To: Quentin McMullen <quentin_mcmullen@BROWN.EDU>

Hi Quentin,

You always have the most interesting cases.

Perhaps, I have the Friday blues and I concede that dependencies on reading
metadata may be a situation where a piece of code might fail because of
variable name case differences. Otherwise, regular code should work fine,
right? Can you give some specifics about how/why the code failed, if it is
not metadata related?

Venky

On Fri, 7 May 2004 14:59:03 -0400, Quentin McMullen
<quentin_mcmullen@BROWN.EDU> wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>A colleague just got bit by an odd problem.  She was rerunning some old
>code and it didn't work on the first pass (gee, that never happens to
>me : )  She mentioned she had done a proc compare on the old and new input
>datasets, and it found no differences, and the code hadn't changed.  I
>thought maybe a hotfix had been installed, or ...  When she debugged, it
>turned out one of the variable names had been changed from upper case to
>mixed case.
>
>Since proc compare does give a nice note when it finds two variables with
>the same name that have different attributes (length, format, etc.), I
>think it would be an improvemet to include in that output two variables
>with the same name that have different capitalizations.
>
>So I want the below code to produce something like:
>
> Variable  Dataset  Type
>
> a         WORK.A   Num
> A         WORK.B   Num
> I         WORK.A   Num
> i         WORK.B   Num
>
>Yes I know this could have been avoided e.g. with options
>validvarname=upcase (or whatever), but since case did become an attribute
>of variable names in v7, it would be nice for proc compare to compare this
>attribute, along with length, format, etc.
>
>Does that seem like a reasonable expectation of proc compare? (It's one of
>my favorite procs...)
>
>
>*no differences;
>data a;
>  a=1;
>  I=2;
>run;
>data b;
>  A=1;
>  i=2;
>run;
>
>proc compare base=a compare=b;
>run;
>
>*finds differences in var attributes;
>data a;
>  a=1;
>  I=2;
>  length a 4;
>  format i mmddyy10.;
>run;
>data b;
>  A=1;
>  i=2;
>run;
>
>proc compare base=a compare=b;
>run;
>
>Kind Regards,
>--Quentin