Question

I have a column in my sas file as age and another column as finalage. I want to substitute the values in age column by values in agefinal column for just one ID (that is 5)

The code that I used was:

Data temp;
set temp;
if ID = 5;
then age = agefinal;
run;

I could not substitute the values. The values in age column did not change. I tried to run this code to check the character length of values since character type is numeric for both the columns.

Code:

Proc contents data = temp;
tables age agefinal;
run;

The output that I got was:

age : character length 3.
agefinal: character length $3

I would appreciate your suggestions.

Answer 1

Try removing the semicolon at the end of the if statement. Right now what you’re doing is deleting all records where the id isn’t equal to five.