| SAS Companion for UNIX Environments |
In the SAS System
under UNIX, character values are sorted by using the ASCII collating sequence.
The following character informats and formats produce
different results in different operating environments, depending on which
character-encoding system the operating system uses. Because UNIX uses the
ASCII character-encoding system, the following informats and formats convert
data to or from ASCII.
- $ASCIIw.
- Since ASCII is the native format under UNIX,
this informat performs no conversion. The $ASCII format behaves exactly like
$CHAR (see
SAS Language Reference: Dictionary).
- $BINARYw.
- This informat converts binary values to
ASCII character data, and this format converts ASCII character data to binary
values.
- $CHARZBw.
- This informat reads character data and converts
any byte that contains a binary zero to a blank.
- $EBCDICw.
- This informat converts EBCDIC character
data to ASCII, and this format converts ASCII character data to EBCDIC.
- $HEXw.
- This informat converts hexadecimal data
to ASCII character data, and this format converts ASCII character data to
hexadecimal data.
- $OCTALw.
- This informat converts octal data to ASCII
character data, and this format converts ASCII character data to octal data.
- $PHEXw.
- This informat converts packed hexadecimal
data to ASCII character data.
All of
the information that you need to use these informats and formats under UNIX
is in
SAS Language Reference: Dictionary.
Character dummy variables (those whose only purpose
is to hold 0 or 1) can be stored in a variable whose length is 1 byte.
Copyright 1999 by SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved.
