Date:         Thu, 26 Jul 2001 11:57:26 -0400
Reply-To:     "Brittain, James" <zqr0@CDC.GOV>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Brittain, James" <zqr0@CDC.GOV>
Subject:      Convert characters to ASCII and back?
Comments: To: "SAS List Serve (E-mail)" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

I am sure there are some formats and informats to do what I am looking for
but I can't seem to find the right ones.  I need to take a character
variable, make a new numeric variable, and then convert it back to the
original character.

Here is the real problem:

I have data that is a list of variables that is shown in the range and I
need to create a dataset with all of the variables.  We are talking about
multiple datasets with at least 1000 variables each so this has to be
dynamic.

here is a sample of the data:

VARIABLE_RANGE
-----------------------------
A1B1 - A1B5
B354 - B360


I need to get it to look like this:

VARIABLE
----------------
A1B1
A1B2
A1B3
A1B4
A1B5
B354
B355
B356
B357
B358
B359
B360

I have that part taken care of already.  I isolated the root and the index
and use a loop to output each variable with the incremented index.  My
problem is that sometimes the index is CHARACTER and SAS can't use that as
an index.  So I wanted to convert the CHARACTER index to the ASCII form and
then convert it back before outputting it but I can't find the right format
or informats.

Here is an example of the problem data:

VARIABLE_RANGE
------------------------------
A3A - A3E

Which should come out as:

VARIABLE
----------------
A3A
A3B
A3C
A3D
A3E



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