The paper looks at the problems which can be caused when non-printable and special characters such as line feeds and carriage returns are present in SAS datasets, how to detect them and how to replace the.

Non printable and special characters can be a source of confusion when they are encountered in SAS, the programmer often only detects them by chance when they notice that the alignment in an output report seems to be disrupted for no apparent reason. A systematic approach to detecting and handling special characters is clearly required in situations when special characters can be reasonably expected and this is just what is set out in this paper.

The paper describes a clear approach for detecting special characters and explains three keyapproaches for dealing with them:

1. Report them to data management and get clean data in the next transfer.
2. Replace NPSC with other characters.
3. Delete NPSC.

Particularly useful is the recommendation to use the compress option with the ‘KW’ modifier (new to SAS version 9) to only keep writable characters.

The paper includes several worked examples as well as useful code fragments.

The paper was presented at the PharmaSUG conference in Orlando 2010. Download the paper here.

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This paper investigates a scenarios that occurs regularly in clinical trials when generating summary tables for categorical data; namely the need to display all possible categories for a CRF even when some categories are not present in the data.

The authors look at what we think is the most commonly used approaches to this problem, i.e. using PROC FREQ/SQL to count the data and forcing out the missing categories by merging the output with a dummy dataset. They then suggest an elegant alternative approach using PROC MEANS in combination with the COMPLETETYPES and PRELOADFMT options.

The paper also suggests how a similar approach can be used to derive total columns.

The paper was presented in the Coder’s Corner section of the PharmaSUG 2012 Conference in San Francisco.

It is available for download here, alternative link.

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The papers we review will all be publically available and will usually have been presented at conferences by organisations such as PhUSE, SAS Global Forum, or PharmaSUG .

Read our first recommendation tomorrow.

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