Suppose you have a list of numbers and want to convert them to a string with leading zeros. Here is the SAS code which does that:
data demo;
input a;
/* convert a number to a 7-character long string*/
b1 = put(a, z7.);
/*use compress function to handle missing values*/
b2 = compress(b1,'.');
/* combine two statements together */
b = compress(put(a, z7.), '.');
datalines;
1234
876
.
; run;
