Language Reference

CONTENTS Function

obtains the variables in a SAS data set

CONTENTS( <libref<, SAS-data-set>)

where SAS-data-set can be specified with a one-level name or with a libref and a SAS data set name. The CONTENTS function returns a character matrix containing the variable names for SAS-data-set. The result is a character matrix with rows, one column, and 8 characters per element, where is the number of variables in the data set. The variable list is returned in the order in which the variables occur in the data set. If a one-level name is provided, IML uses the default SAS data library (as specified in the DEFLIB= option). If no arguments are specified, the current open input data set is used. Some examples follow:

  
    x=contents();             /* current open input data set */ 
  
    x=contents('work','a');   /* contents of data set A in   */ 
                              /* WORK library                */
 

See also the description of the SHOW contents statement.