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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nI was reminded today how useful a SAS log can be, even when it doesn’t give you any errors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m analyzing data from a study on educational technology in rural schools. The first step is to concatenate 10 different data sets. I want to keep the source of the data, that is, which data set it came from, so if there are issues with these data, outliers, etc. I can more easily pinpoint where it occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used the IN= option for each data set when I read them in and then some IF statements to assign a source. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
DATA mydata.all_users18 ;
After I run the data step, I see that 425 observations do not have a value for “source”. How would you spot the error? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, there is more than one way, but I thought the simplest thing was to search in the SAS log and see which of the data sets had exactly 425 observations. Yep. There it is. Took me 2 seconds to find.
147 PROC IMPORT DATAFILE=REFFILE
NOTE: The import data set has 425 observations and 2 variables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I looked at the code again and sure enough, I had misspelled “source”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IF\u00a0 slp THEN source = “Spirit Pre” ;
You might think I could have just read through the code, and you are right, but there were a lot of lines of code. In this case, I could immediately identify that it was something to do with that specific data set and reduce the code I needed to look at significantly. I just started with the last place that data set was referenced to work backward. Fortunately for me, it was in the very last place I called it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n