Chapter 5: Informats

Definition of Informats

An informat is an instruction that SAS uses to read data values into a variable. For example, the following value contains a dollar sign and commas:

 ,000,000 

To remove the dollar sign ($) and commas (,) before storing the numeric value 1000000 in a variable, read this value with the COMMA11. informat.

Unless you explicitly define a variable first, SAS uses the informat to determine whether the variable is numeric or character. SAS also uses the informat to determine the length of character variables .