Hack 3.3 Creating a Detailed Contents Listing of A SAS Catalog

SAS Programming Professionals,

Did you know that you can create a detailed listing of the contents of a SAS catalog?

To do so, simply specify the CONTENTS statement in the CATALOG procedure.  This can come in handy when you receive a catalog from out-of-house that is ostensibly a format catalog associated with variables in an attendant SAS data set.  

You can determine what, exactly, is in the catalog by running PROC CATALOG thusly:

      libname newproj "H:\newproject\inputlib";

      proc catalog catalog=newproj.myfmts;

           contents stats;

      quit;

The CONTENTS statement instructs SAS to display the objects stored in the catalog.  The STATS option directs SAS to provide all of the statistics available for the entries in the format catalog.  Without the STATS option, a more abbreviated table is created.

Running the CATALOG procedure shows that the catalog I received contains only two formats:

Contents of Catalog NEWPROJ.MYFMTS
#	Name	Type	Create Date	Modified Date	Description	Page Size	Block Size	Num of Blocks	Last Block Bytes	Last Block Size	Pages
1	AGEGROUP	FORMAT	22Jun14:12:51:45	22Jun14:12:51:45		4096	4096	1	245	510	1
2	GENDER	FORMATC	22Jun14:12:51:45	22Jun14:12:51:45		4096	4096	1	219	255	1

  …and I was expecting one format for each of the 427 variables in the SAS data set they sent.  So, I will have to contact the sender with news of my own QC of the format catalog they sent!

Best of luck in all your SAS endeavors!

----MMMMIIIIKKKKEEEE

(aka Michael A. Raithel)

Excerpt from the book:  Did You Know That?  Essential Hacks for Clever SAS Programmers

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-A.-Raithel/e/B001K8GG90/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

I plan to post each and every one of the hacks in the book to social media on a weekly basis.  Please pass them along to colleagues who you know would benefit.