Starting with SAS Data Sets

Input SAS Data Set for Examples

The examples in this section use a SAS data set named CITY, which contains information about expenditures for a small city. It reports total city expenditures for the years 1980 through 2000 and divides the expenses into two major categories: services and administration. (To see the program that creates the CITY data set, see DATA Step to Create the Data Set CITY.)

The following example uses the DATASETS procedure with the NOLIST option to display the CITY data set. The NOLIST option prevents the DATASETS procedure from listing other data sets that are also located in the WORK library:

proc datasets library=work nolist;
   contents data=city;
run;

The Structure of CITY as Shown by PROC DATASETS

                                 The SAS System                                1

                             The DATASETS Procedure

Data Set Name: WORK.CITY                                Observations:         21 1 
Member Type:   DATA                                     Variables:            10 1 
Engine:        V8                                       Indexes:              0 
Created:       9:54 Wednesday, October 6, 1999          Observation Length:   80
Last Modified: 9:54 Wednesday, October 6, 1999          Deleted Observations: 0 
Protection:                                             Compressed:           NO
Data Set Type:                                          Sorted:               NO
Label:                                                                          


                  -----Engine/Host Dependent Information-----  2 

Data Set Page Size:         8192                                                
Number of Data Set Pages:   1                                                   
First Data Page:            1                                                   
Max Obs per Page:           101                                                 
Obs in First Data Page:     21                                                  
Number of Data Set Repairs: 0                                                   
File Name:                  /usr/tmp/code_editor_saswork/SAS_                   
                            work63ED00006E98/city.sas7bdat                      
Release Created:            8.0001M0                                            
Host Created:               HP-UX                                               
Inode Number:               62403                                               
Access Permission:          rw-r--r--                                           
Owner Name:                 abcdef                                              
File Size (bytes):          16384                                               


              -----Alphabetic List of Variables and Attributes-----
 
3  #    Variable               Type    Len    Pos 4  Label
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   5    AdminLabor             Num       8     32    Administration: Labor    
   6    AdminSupplies          Num       8     40    Administration: Supplies 
   9    AdminTotal             Num       8     64    Administration: Total    
   7    AdminUtilities         Num       8     48    Administration: Utilities
   3    ServicesFire           Num       8     16    Services: Fire           
   2    ServicesPolice         Num       8      8    Services: Police         
   8    ServicesTotal          Num       8     56    Services: Total          
   4    ServicesWater_Sewer    Num       8     24    Services: Water & Sewer  
  10    Total                  Num       8     72    Total Outlays            
   1    Year                   Num       8      0

The following list corresponds to the numbered items in the previous SAS output:

	The Observations and the Variables fields identify the number of observations and the number of variables.
	The Engine/Host Dependent Information section lists detailed information about the data set. This information is generated by the engine, which is the mechanism for reading from and writing to files. Operating Environment Information: The output in this section may differ, depending on your operating environment. For more information, refer to the SAS documentation for your operating environment.
	The Alphabetic List of Variables and Attributes lists the name, type, length, and position of each variable.
	The Label lists the format, informat, and label for each variable, if they exist.

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