Treat missing values as zero in SAS where clause

sas
Adnan picture Adnan · Jun 24, 2009 · Viewed 24.8k times · Source

Is there an equivalent of the Oracle NVL function in SAS?

For example, if I have a where clause in SAS that says:

where myVar > -2;

it is not going to include any rows that have myVar = .

If I want to treat missing values as zero, i have to say:

where myVar > -2 or missing( myVar )

I'd like to be able to do something like:

where NVL( myVar, 0 ) > -2 // or some SAS equivalent

Is there something like this in SAS?

Answer

Ville Koskinen picture Ville Koskinen · Jun 25, 2009

The coalesce function should do the job.

where coalesce(myVar,0) > -2

I'm not sure if the function became available in SAS 9, so if you have a really old SAS version this might not work.

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