如何在SAS中动态重命名变量？

Question

I have a sas data set. In it i have some variables following a pattern

 -W 51 Sales
 -W 52 Sales
 -W 53 Sales

and so on.

Now i want to rename all of these variables dynamically such that W 51 is replaced by starting date of that week and the new name becomes - 5/2/2013 Sales ?

The reason i want to rename them is that i have sales data of all the 53 weeks in an year and the data set would be eassier for me to understand if i had the starting date of a week instead of W(week_no) Sales as a variable name

Is there any way i can do that in sas?

Answer 1

You really don't want to rename your variables. You may think you do, but it'll just bite you eventually.

What you can do instead is give them descriptive labels. This can be done via proc datasets .

proc datasets library=<lib>;
    modify <dataset>;
    label <variable> '5/2/2013 sales';
run;

Answer 2

Just for fun lets assume you want to do this anyway -- Safest thing to do is just create a copy of the dataset for your output...

this code assumes your variable names are named like w1_sales and output names are going to be renamed to 03JAN2013_sale or something like that.

     data newDataSet; 
        set oldDataSet;

     %MACRO rename_vars(mdataset,year);
        data &mdataset.;
           set &mdataset.;
            %do i = 1 %to 53;
             %let weekStartDate = %sysfunc(intnx('week&i','01jan&year.'d,0));         %*returns the starting day of week(i) uses sunday as starting date.  If you want monday use 0.1 as last param;    
             %let weekstartDateFormatted =  %sysfunc(putn(&weekStartDate.,DATE.))     %*formats into ddMONyyy. substitute whatever format you want;
             rename w&i._Sale = &weekstartDateFormatted ._SALES;   
            %end;
          run;
    %MEND rename_vars;

    %rename_vars(newDataSet,2013);

I don't have time to test this right now, so sommebody let me know if I screwed it up somewhere. This should at least get you going though. Or you can send me or post some code to read a small sample dataset (obviously if this is possible without having to share some proprietary info. You might have to genericize it a bit) with those vars like that and I'll debug it.