Date:         Mon, 7 Jul 2008 07:40:51 -0700
Reply-To:     Takeadoe <mtonkovich@MSN.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Takeadoe <mtonkovich@MSN.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: How To Quickly Examine Multiple Fields and Select Nonmissing
              Value(s)
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Jul 7, 10:13 am, Takeadoe <mtonkov...@msn.com> wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> I've got a job that needs far more experience than I have.  A sample
> of the dataset follows: I'm using "m" to indicate missing value.
>
> ID1   ID2   ID3  ID4  ID5  ID6
> 6       m    m    m    m    m
> m      98   m    m    m    m
> m      m    76   76   m    m
> 8       m    m    m   m    m
>
> My goal is a dataset that looks like this:
>
> ID
> 6
> 98
> 76
> 8
>
> So, how can I easily check each of the 6 ID fields and assign the
> nonmissing value to the new variable ID?  Note that there will be an
> occassion where a record may contain 2 or more nonmissing values.  The
> values will be the same in all cases when that happens.
>
> Any help at all, would be great.  The dataset is nearly 1,000,000
> records.

Hey gang - I started reading through some of the other posts (probably
something I should have done first, sorry) and realized that the max()
function was just what I needed!