Hi All,

Was wondering if anyone had a favorite macro that would output proc compare results to a dataset in a nice format?

I love PROC COMPARE. But I hate the output datasets it gives (at least as far as I have looked, certainly may be missing something). I hate the dataset output so much, I've never taken the time to build what I would want as an output dataset from PROC CONTENTS. So was wondering if I'm missing something obvious, or if someone else has built it already.

What I (think) I want is a tool (probably macro, but I'm happy to write the macro part) where I could compare two datasets, and output a dataset with the results of the comparisons on every *value*. (I'm not worried about dataset attributes or variable attributes, just comparison of values).

So I imagine a structure something like:

id variable base_value compare_value

I suppose to accomodate numeric and character vars I might end up with :

id variable base_value_n compare_value_n base_value_c compare_value_c

If a record (id) was found in one dataset but not the other, I would want to assign the value to be a special missing code.

I suppose since there can be multiple ID vars, I would need to have multiple ID vars in the output dataset (or one character variable that held all of the ID values).

I could be off track here. So certainly open to hearing thoughts from others before I delve into this.

As much as I love proc compare now for SHOWING me what the differences are between two datasets, I haven't managed to have it give me this information in a usefully organized dataset. So when I want a dataset, I often resort to merging two datasets, renaming the variables in one version, then comparing the values myself in a datastep. Which works, but I'm sure there's a better way.

Kind Regards, --Quentin