Hi Shukla

You already have many useful suggestions from other experts. Here is my way using array with loop reduction. That means that once a pair of equal values are found the loop will be terminated and move to next observation. I hope that speeds large data set manipulations a little bit.

data test; input b1-b8; datalines; 2 0 5 6 3 0 0 0 3 0 4 0 0 3 2 0 0 2 0 4 5 7 9 1 1 4 1 0 1 0 4 5 0 1 3 0 4 5 6 6 ; run;

data obtain (drop=i j); set test; flag=0; array b{8} b1-b8; do i=1 to 7; do j=1 to 8-i; if b{i} eq b{i+j} and b{i} ne 0 then do; flag=1; leave; end; end; end; run;

Best, Zhaoyan

On 1/11/2011 11:40 AM, Shukla Kshirsagar wrote: > I have 8 brands in a dataset, with possible values of 0-9 for each of them. > > I want to write macro code, where I can look for ties in the values of the > brands, and create a flag. > e.g if brand1=brand2 or brand1=3 or......brand1=brand8 > or brand2=brand3........ > then flag=1 > > b1 b2 b3 b4 b5 b6 b7 b8 flag > 2 0 5 6 3 0 0 0 0 > 3 0 4 0 0 3 2 0 1 > > > Thanks for your help, > Shukla >