On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:38:29 -0800, Chuck D <cdarby@COVHS.ORG> wrote:

>I'm trying to create a flat file on the mainframe from a sas dataset. >When the date is 'no value' or zeros I want it to fill the output >field with spaces but it continually puts 010100 no matter what I do. >The date in the sas dataset is PD3 and I believe it contains 00000. >Any ideas on what's up with this.

I would normally advise against trying to place spaces into a PD3 field. Spaces are character, PD3. is a PACKED NUMERIC format, and this could cause problems for downstream software reading the file.

However, if you MUST have spaces in there, you could try this format:

proc format ; value pd3spc .,0 = ' ' other = [pd3.] ; run ;

and use this as the output format:

put date pd3spc. ;

It should work (but I don't have a mainframe here to try it on).

Whenever I've faced this problem in the past, I have put '000000' into the field when the date was not valid, this seems to keep downstream readers happy.

Don