Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 22:59:40 +0000
Reply-To: John Whittington <johnw@MAG-NET.CO.UK>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From: John Whittington <johnw@MAG-NET.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: Conditional Formats
On Tue, 2 Apr 1996, Peter Lund <PeterL@OFM.WA.GOV> wrote:
>John, et. al.-
> I think everyone is agreed that, in general, you can't conditionally
>assign formats in the way you describe. However, in your specific example,
>wouldn't the following give you what you need:
>
> if y=1 then x = round(x,.01);
> else x = round(x,.0001);
>
>I know this only works because there is a function that approximates the
>format and so the concept is limited. But, in this case, it works.
Peter - not really, I'm afraid. The real trouble with this approach is that
you would still have to use a W.4 format in order to be able to print either
'version' - and this format would result in 4 decimal places being printed,
even if the value of x had been rounded to 0.01. For example, a value
rounded to 0.04 would print as 0.0400. One point of the conditional format,
as in my example, is that one can determine the number of decimal places
being printed. In any event, as Peter says, this approach could not be used
for most other format situations (e.g. date, character etc.).
Also, such an approach has to be done in a preceding DATA step. If one were
printing directly from a permanent dataset, one would have to add a DATA
step specifically for this purpose. Furthermore, this approach actually
alters the value of the variable, which might not be what one wants to do.
John
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