Date:         Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:05:06 -0800
Reply-To:     karma <dorjetarap@GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         karma <dorjetarap@GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: data manipulation
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Nov 18, 11:10 pm, hd <heen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My question is if I have a data set that looks like this
>
> Var     Set
> a       1
> b
> c
> d       2
> e
> f
> g
> h       3
> i
>
> and I would like it to like this
>
> Var     Set
> a       1
> b       1
> c       1
> d       2
> e       2
> f       2
> g       2
> h       3
> i       3
>
> In other words I want to just duplicate the entries until I reach an
> entry in the Set column and then want to duplicate that. I am not sure
> how I can do this, any help will be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you!

Hi,

Here I assign the non-missing value of set to a temporary variable and
then use retain - which tells SAS not to reinitialize the variable -
and then assign the variable back to set for the missing values.

data have;
infile cards missover;
input var$ set;
cards;
a       1
b
c
d       2
e
f
g
h       3
i
;run;
proc print;run;
data want(drop=_:);
   set have;
   retain _x;
   if ^missing(set) then _x = set;
   else set = _x;
   run;
proc print;run;

Alternatively you can take advantage of the drop executing before the
rename dataset option and avoid the second assignments:

data want(drop=set rename=(_x=set));
   set have;
   retain _x;
   if ^missing(set) then _x = set;
   run;
proc print;run;