MISSING OPTION

You have just printed out a listing of the number of Adverse Events for each patient in a drug study. Since no data exist for patients without occurrences, the listing shows a ‘.’ for these patients, even though it should say ‘0’. Now you could write a DATA step to change the missing values to zero, or you could format the value to zero. Since you don’t need this information anywhere else, why not just change the global option:

option missing = '0';

The MISSING option allows you to change the character displayed when missing numeric data is encountered. So instead of ‘.’ in our output, we now have ‘0’ displayed. In fact, all displays of the data after the invocation of this option will be set to the new value. So remember to change the option back after your output statements or you
might get unexpected results later in your program.