Dynamically remove variables containing a value

Question

suppose to have the following:

    hospital      region     place     exemption      low      
    NotValue      NotValue    30           3        NotValue      

I have totally 100 variables. I would like to remove all variables containing "NotValue" dynamically in the sense that I cannot list all the variable names. Is there an easy way to do this?

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

One way is to iterate through all of your columns and save the variable name into a space-separated list every time a variable's value is "NotValue." You can pass this into a macro variable and create your desired dataset with another data step.

data _null_;
    set have;
    array charvars[*] _CHARACTER_;
    length dropvars $3200.;

    do i = 1 to dim(charvars);
        if(charvars[i] = 'NotValue') 
            then dropvars = catx(' ', dropvars, vname(charvars[i]));
    end;

    call symputx('dropvars', dropvars);
run;

data want;
    set have;
    drop &dropvars;
run;

place     exemption      
30        3