Date:         Sat, 23 Sep 2006 05:45:56 -0700
Reply-To:     Jon <jtsas999@YAHOO.CO.UK>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Jon <jtsas999@YAHOO.CO.UK>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: How do I convert this character to number
              10000000000000000001?
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I answered my own question here! Only saw it after I posted - duh. To
split it into two manageable numbers. For the query below, I wanted to
use proc summary to count, but it will only count numerics and not
characters. With the split, I can obtain the desired result.



Richard A. DeVenezia wrote:
> join wrote:
> > If I use the normal route it drops the last digit = 100000000000000000
> >
> > The current database uses two keys of these values.
>
> > Using numerics
> > would enable me to count
>
> Ummm, you can do frequency counts on variables of numeric or character type.
> Do not need to convert to numeric.
>
> > and use other statistic routines on these
> > keys.
>
> What kind of statistics would you be doing on your long winded keys?
> Average customer_id?  Id's generally do not form an algebra.  Combining
> numbers by addition to create a new id does not seem sensible.  What happens
> if you need to decompose the new id?
>
> Granted, DoubleWord length numerics has been sufficient for SAS programming
> up til now.  Somewhere down the line (3-5 years+?), either quadword (16byte)
> numerics (or wider still) will be the default, or some sort of typing will
> be introduced into DATA Step language / SAS fundamentals.
>
> --
> Richard A. DeVenezia
> http://www.devenezia.com/