A Program to Compare Two SAS Format Catalogs

SAS programming professionals are sometimes faced with the task of determining the differences between two SAS format catalogs.  Perhaps they received an updated format catalog from a collaborating organization; or maybe a colleague updated a format catalog to reflect changes in the underlying data.  Either way; how can programmers tell which catalog entries and value/label pairs have been modified?  If the two catalogs being compared are relatively small, then the tried-and-true method of outputting each of them via the FMTLIB option of PROC CATALOG and then manually comparing the listings may suffice.  But, this method is laborious and error-prone when there are a large number of formats and format value/label pairs.

This paper presents a SAS program that compares two SAS format catalogs and reports the differences between them. It identifies mismatches in the format name, start value, end value, and label…