Michael Little wrote: > > Hi, > > Is there any method similar to the CALL LABEL() routine to find the > length of a SAS variable (both char and numeric) and any date format > that was permanently associated with numeric vars? I suppose I can > always grep from a Proc Contents (SAS 6.11 for AIX), but I'd like a more > elegant way. (Or is it just soooo simple and I don't see it?) > > Thanks, > Mike > > -- > Michael Little, Social Science Computing > 353 McNeil, phone: 215-573-3331, 215-898-6454 > little@ssc.upenn.edu

First, let's leave GREP at home. Some day you may wish to run SAS code on a whole operating system. ;)

Both PROC CONTENTS and PROC DATASETS will produce an output dataset with the all the information you have requested (plus tons you didn't).

PROC CONTENTS DATA=yourdata NOPRINT OUT=directry; RUN;

My perferred way is to use the Dictionary.columns tabel with PROC SQL to get the information.

PROC SQL; SELECT NAME, LABEL, LENGTH, TYPE, FORMAT FROM DICTIONARY.COLUMNS WHERE MEMNAME=yourdata;

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