Produces a separate
section of the report for each BY group.
|
BY
<DESCENDING> variable-1
<...<DESCENDING>
variable-n>
<NOTSORTED>;
|
|
- variable
- specifies the variable that the procedure uses to form BY
groups. You can specify more than one variable. If you do not use the NOTSORTED
option in the BY statement, the observations in the data set must either
be sorted by all the variables that you specify, or they must be indexed appropriately.
Variables in a BY statement are called BY variables.
- DESCENDING
- specifies that the data set is sorted in descending order
by the variable that immediately follows the word DESCENDING in the BY statement.
- specifies that observations are not necessarily sorted in
alphabetic or numeric order. The data are grouped in another way, for example,
chronological order.
The requirement for ordering or indexing observations according to the
values of BY variables is suspended for BY-group processing when you use
the NOTSORTED option. In fact, the procedure does not use an index if you
specify NOTSORTED. The procedure defines a BY group as a set of contiguous
observations that have the same values for all BY variables. If observations
with the same values for the BY variables are not contiguous, the procedure
treats each contiguous set as a separate BY group.
PROC PRINT uses a special layout if all BY variables appear in the same
order at the beginning of the ID statement. (See Creating a Customized Layout with BY Groups and ID Variables .)
If
you use the BY statement with the SAS system option NOBYLINE, which suppresses
the BY line that normally appears in output produced with BY-group processing,
PROC PRINT always starts a new page for each BY group. This behavior ensures
that if you create customized BY lines by putting BY-group information in
the title and suppressing the default BY lines with NOBYLINE, the information
in the titles matches the report on the pages. (See
Creating Titles That Contain BY-Group Information .)
Copyright 1999 by SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved.
