Date:         Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:24:17 -0500
Reply-To:     Lou <lpogoda@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Lou <lpogoda@HOTMAIL.COM>
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Subject:      Re: Sort and Merge
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu

"FPAStatman" <brentvtimothy@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:724dce79-0717-476a-9429-26fa6fb6a3e5@e18g2000yqo.googlegroups.com...
> I have run into an interesting error, which I cannot figure out how to
> solve.  I will provide an example of what I am doing below:
>
> DATA a;
> INPUT name $ id;
> CARDS;
> northwest 1
> northeast 2
> southwest 1
> southeast 2
> ;
> DATA b;
> INPUT name $ input;
> CARDS;
> northwest 5
> southwest 6
> ;
> PROC SORT data=a;
> BY name;
> PROC SORT data=b;
> BY name;
>
> DATA b;
> MERGE b a;
> BY name;
>
> This is a simplification of the process, but basically the same.  I
> then get an error saying:
> ERROR: BY variables are not properly sorted on the dataset user.a.
>
> Why are they not properly sorted after a sort statement?  There is no
> error in the sort statment, and it says that SAS sort was used.
>
> Thanks

Apparently you've oversimplified - the code you posted runs without
generating an ERROR message on SAS 9.1 under Windows.  (It's not correct,
mind you, unless you're aiming at a rather odd result - it just doesn't
generate an error message.)

The usual reason for an error in situations like this is that the BY
variable has different lengths on the two datasets being merged and you list
the dataset with the shorter length first.  That sets the length of that
variable to the shorter length, and values get truncated on the second
dataset.  Admittedly, that's not the case here.