SAS formats have the following form:
$
indicates a character
format. Its absence indicates a numeric format.
format
names the format.
The format is a SAS format or a user-defined format that was previously
defined with the VALUE statement in PROC FORMAT.
| See |
For information about
user-defined formats, see FORMAT Procedure in Base SAS Procedures Guide. |
w
specifies the format
width, which for most formats is the number of columns in the output
data.
d
specifies an optional
decimal scaling factor in the numeric formats.
Formats contain a period
(.) as a part of the name. If you omit the w and d values
from the format, SAS uses default values. The d value
that you specify with a format tells SAS to display that many decimal
places. Formats never change or truncate the internally stored data
values.
For example, in DOLLAR10.2,
the w value of 10 specifies
a maximum of 10 columns for the value. The d value
of 2 specifies that two of these columns are for the decimal part
of the value, which leaves eight columns for the remaining characters
in the value. The remaining columns include the decimal point, the
remaining numeric value, a minus sign if the value is negative, the
dollar sign, and commas, if any.
If the format width
is too narrow to represent a value, SAS tries to squeeze the value
into the space available. Character formats truncate values on the
right. Numeric formats sometimes revert to the BEST
w.d format.
SAS prints asterisks if you do not specify an adequate width. In the
following example, the result is x=**.
x=123;
put x= 2.;
If you use an incompatible
format, such as a numeric format to write character values, SAS first
attempts to use an analogous format of the other type. If this attempt
fails, an error message that describes the problem is displayed in
the SAS log.
When the value of d is
greater than 15, the precision of the decimal value after the 15th
significant digit might not be accurate.