Question from the Field

Question: How can you create a program to spot all occurrences of a value across many different columns in a data set?

Answer: There is a VNAME function that will return the name of the variable associated with a given array reference. Here's a program that does what you ask. Check out the final DATA step; the first two steps are just generating some sample data:

/*Make up some dummy data*/

data data;
    do obs=1 to 20;
    do varnum=1 to 10;
        varname='NumVar'!!left(varnum);
        value=round(ranuni(123)*10);
    output;
    end;
    end;
run;

proc transpose data=data out=testdata(drop=obs _name_);
    by obs;
    var value;
    id varname;
run;

data testdata;
    set testdata;
    length refused $ 200;
    array numvar {10};
    do index=1 to 10;
if numvar{index}=7 then refused=catx(' ',refused,vname(numvar{index}));
    end;
run;

proc print data=testdata; 
run;

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