digits

Return the number of digits necessary to represent a NUMERIC value.

%let digs=%digits(value);

Argument

value : input numeric value to represent.

Returns

digs : the number of digits (in base 10) necessary to represent the number value.

Examples

The simple runs:

%let dig1=%digits(10);
%let dig2=%digits(999.4);

return dig1=2 and dig2=3 respectively.

Run macro %_example_digits for more examples.

Notes

1. In short, the macro simply returns:

%sysevalf(%sysfunc(floor(%sysfunc(log(&value))/%sysfunc(log(10)) + 1)));

1. This macro can be useful to encode and/or (re)format variables in a table, e.g. by finding the maximum value or the number of occurrences of the variables in the table.