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sasenterprise-guide

SAS attrn not returning correct number of observations

I am working in SAS Enterprise guide on a line of code that is supposed to read the number of observations in a dataset. The dataset contains 3 rows (observations).

I write the following line of code to get the number of observations and store it in the number_observations variable: 

call symputx("number_observations", put(attrn(dsid, "nobs"),best.));

However, instead of getting a result of 3, this line returns 9 for me

Any idea what is happening? I should maybe also note that I manually edited this table (it used to have 9 rows).

Solution

  • Use nlobs instead of nobs. nlobs gives the number of logical observations, honoring any records marked for deletion.

    There are some situations where nlobs will return -1 if it doesn't know the number of observations. My favorite countobs paper is http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi26/p095-26.pdf.