The READ statement reads observations from the current SAS data set.

The arguments to the READ statement are as follows:

range

specifies a range of observations.

operand

selects a set of variables.

expression

is evaluated for being true or false.

name

is the name of the target matrix.

row-name

is a character matrix or quoted literal that contains descriptive row labels.

column-name

is a character matrix or quoted literal that contains descriptive column labels.

The clauses and options are explained in the following lists.

Use the READ statement to read variables or records from the current SAS data set into column matrices of the VAR clause or into the single matrix of the INTO clause. When the INTO clause is used, each variable in the VAR clause becomes a column of the target matrix, and all variables in the VAR clause must be of the same type. If you specify no VAR clause, the default variables for the INTO clause are all numeric variables. Read all character variables into a target matrix by using VAR _CHAR_.

You can use any of the following keywords to specify a range of observations:

ALL

all observations

CURRENT

the current observation

NEXT <number>

the next observation or the next number of observations

AFTER

all observations after the current one

POINT value

observations specified by number, where value can be one of the following.

Value	Example
a single record number	point 5
a literal that contains several	point {2 5 10}
record numbers
the name of a matrix	point p
that contains record numbers
an expression in parentheses	point (p+1)

If the current data set has an index in use (see the INDEX statement, the POINT option is invalid.

You can specify a set of variables to use with the VAR clause. The operand in the VAR clause can be one of the following:

• a literal that contains variable names

• the name of a matrix that contains variable names

• an expression in parentheses that yields variable names

• one of keywords described in the following list:

  _ALL_

  for all variables

  _CHAR_

  for all character variables

  _NUM_

  for all numeric variables.

The following examples demonstrate each possible way you can use the VAR clause.

   var {x1 x5 x9};          /* a literal matrix of names         */
   var x;                   /* a matrix that contains the names  */
   var("x1":"x9");          /* an expression                     */
   var _all_;               /* a keyword                         */

The WHERE clause conditionally selects observations, within the range specification, according to conditions given in the clause. The general form of the WHERE clause is as follows:

The arguments to the WHERE clause are as follows:

variable

is a variable in the SAS data set.

comparison-op

is one of the following comparison operators:

<

less than

<=

less than or equal to

=

equal to

>

greater than

>=

greater than or equal to

=

not equal to

?

contains a given string

?

does not contain a given string

=:

begins with a given string

=*

sounds like or is spelled like a given string

operand

is a literal value, a matrix name, or an expression in parentheses.

WHERE comparison arguments can be matrices. For the following operators, the WHERE clause succeeds if all the elements in the matrix satisfy the condition:

For the following operators, the WHERE clause succeeds if any of the elements in the matrix satisfy the condition:

Logical expressions can be specified within the WHERE clause by using the AND (&) and OR (|) operators. The general form is

where clause can be a comparison, a parenthesized clause, or a logical expression clause that is evaluated by using operator precedence.

Note: The expression on the left-hand side refers to values of the data set variables, and the expression on the right-hand side refers to matrix values.

You can specify ROWNAME= and COLNAME= matrices as part of the INTO clause. The COLNAME= matrix specifies the name of a new character matrix to be created. This COLNAME= matrix is created in addition to the target matrix of the INTO clause and contains variable names from the input data set corresponding to columns of the target matrix. The COLNAME= matrix has dimension nvar, where nvar is the number of variables contributing to the target matrix.

The ROWNAME= option specifies the name of a character variable in the input data set. The values of this variable are put in a character matrix with the same name as the variable. This matrix has the dimension nobs, where nobs is the number of observations in the range of the READ statement.

The range, VAR, WHERE, and INTO clauses are all optional and can be specified in any order.

Row and column names created via a READ statement are permanently associated with the INTO matrix. You do not need to use a MATTRIB statement to get this association.

For example, to read all observations from the data set variables NAME and AGE, use a READ statement with the VAR clause and the keyword ALL for the range operand. This creates two vectors with the same names as the data set variables. Here is the statement:

   read all var{name age};

To read all variables for the 23rd observation only, use the following statement:

   read point 23;

To read the data set variables NAME and ADDR for all observations with a STATE value of 'NJ', use the following statement:

   read all var{name addr} where(state="NJ");

See Chapter 7 for further information.