Hi David,

The information regarding the columns in a table can be found easily with proc sql.

Some useful tips are;

proc sql; describe table dictionary.columns; describe table dictionary.tables;

create table columns as select * from dictionary.columns where libname='YOUR_LIB' and memname='YOUR_TABLE'; quit;

with those tools is very easy to build a macro for returning the type of a varible:

%macro typeOfVar(memname=WORK,libname=DATA1,name=); proc sql noprint; select type into :type from dictionary.columns where memname=trim(upcase("&memname.")) and libname=trim(upcase("&libname.")) and name=trim(upcase("&name.")); quit; %mend typeOfVar;

or you can create dataset like:

proc sql; create table numVarsInWORK as select libname, memname, name, type, format from dictionary.tables where libname='WORK'; quit;

The code is very easy to read and the information you can get is awesome.

Regards, Manuel

David Wright wrote:

> Is there a way to check if a data set variable is numeric, without having to > write lots of confusing code? > > I have a macro which runs some datastep statements including the Substr() > function, and I want to skip everything if the data step variable is not > charater (or many convert it). > > Now I could use Fopen and attrm, but I really don't want to get into all that > because if makes the code complex and The Others upset.