Technology Tales

ERROR: This range is repeated, or values overlap: - .

15^th September 2012

This is another posting in an occasional series on SAS error and warning messages that aren't as clear as they'd need to be. What produced the message was my creation of a control data set that I then wished to use to create a data-driven (in)format. It was the PROC FORMAT step that issued the message, and I got no (in)format created. However, there were no duplicate entries in the control data set as the message suggested to me, so a little more investigation was needed.

What that revealed was that there might be one variable missing from the data set that I needed to have. The SAS documentation has defined FMTNAME, START and LABEL as compulsory variables, with each of them containing the following: format name, initial value and displayed value. My intention was this: to create a numeric code variable for one containing character strings using my data-driven format, with then numbers specified within a character variable as it should be. What was missing then was TYPE.

This variable can be one of the following values: C for character formats, I for numeric informats, J for character informats, N for numeric formats and P for picture formats. Due to it being a conversion from character values to numeric ones, I set the values of TYPE to I and used an input function to do the required operations. The code for successfully creating the informat is below:

proc sql noprint;
    create table tpts as
        select distinct "_vstpt" as fmtname,
                        "I" as type,
                        vstpt as start,
                        vstpt as end,
                        strip(put(vstptnum,best.)) as label
            from test
                where not missing(vstptnum);
quit;

proc format library=work cntlin=tpts;
run;
quit;

Though I didn't need to do it, I added an END variable too for the sake of completeness. In this case, the range is such that its start and end are the same and there are cases where that will not be the case, though I am not dwelling on those.