RGB Color Matrix

There is a scene in the movie Vegas Vacation where cousin Eddie says "I'll have some of the yella and don't get cheap on me". If you were to select a yellow, just how yellow is yellow, how blue is blue, etc...?

RGB (red, green, blue) is an additive color scheme that can produce 16.7 million colors. Each of the primary colors is comprised of hexidecimal (hex) values that range from 00 to FF or 256 unique values. If you take those 256 values to the 3rd power, for each of the 3 RGB color, you get 256**3 = 16,777,216. SAS identifies RGB colors with a CX prefix where CX000000 is black (no color), CXFF0000 is red, CX00FF00 is green, CX0000FF is blue and CXFFFFFF is white (all colors).

The idea for this post comes from a paper by Perry Watts, one of the foremost experts on SAS and colors. What I did was to extract and whittle down the 280 predefined SAS colors in the version 8 documentation and changed some of the grouped assignments. The goal was to create a one page matrix of the 161 colors that were retained. The below image reveals the structure of the retained colors in the CNS (color naming system) SAS data set.

The below code uses proc SQL to determine the size of the two dimensional array and to assign column names to the output data set. A DOW-loop is used to load data into the temporary two dimensional array to properly slot the colors into the correct locations. After that, the data from the temporary array is assigned to the columns and written to the output data set.

The compute block in proc report is used to define the background color using the RGB color code. The next image is the final resulting color matrix.

%macro rgbcolormatrix ;
  %local
    columnnames
    columncount
    tablecolumns
    tablerows
    i
    column
  ;
 
  proc sql noprint ;
    select       group
               , count( * )
      into       :columnnames separated by " "
               , :columncount separated by ","
      from       cns
      group by   group ;
  quit ;
 
  %let tablecolumns = &sqlobs. ;
  %let tablerows = %sysfunc( max( &columncount. ) ) ;
 
  data sascolors( keep = obs &columnnames. ) ;
    length Obs 3 ;
    array atemp[ &tablerows., &tablecolumns. ] $8 _temporary_ ;
    array akeep[ &tablecolumns. ] $8 &columnnames. ;
 
    do until( eof ) ;
      col + 1 ;
      do row = 1 by 1 until( last.group ) ;
        set cns end = eof ;
          by group ;
        atemp[ row, col ] = rgb ;
      end ;
    end ;
 
    do row = 1 to &tablerows. ;
      do col = 1 to &tablecolumns. ;
        akeep[ col ] = atemp[ row, col ] ;
      end ;
      obs + 1 ;
      output ;
    end ;
  run ;
 
  ods listing close ;
  ods pdf
    file      = "%sysfunc( pathname( work ) )\rgbcolormatrix.pdf"
    notoc
    author    = "Tom Bellmer"
    title     = "RGB Color Matrix" ;
 
    options nodate nonumber ;
    title ;
 
    proc report
      data = sascolors
      style( header ) = [ background = cx4d7ebf foreground = cx000000 ]
      nowd
    ;
 
      columns obs ( 'RGB Colors' &columnnames. ) ;
      define obs / center ;
 
      %do i = 1 %to &tablecolumns. ;
        %let column = %scan( &columnnames., &i. ) ;
        compute &column. ;
          if not missing( &column. ) then do ;
            if substr( &column., 3, 1 )
              in ( '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6' ,'7' )
              and &column. not in ( 'CX00FF00', 'CX00FFFF' ) then
              colorval = cat( 'style={foreground=white background='
                , &column., ' font_size = 8pt}' ) ;
            else
              colorval = cat( 'style={foreground=black background='
                , &column., ' font_size = 8pt}' ) ;
 
            call define( _col_, 'style', colorval ) ;
          end ;
        endcomp ;
      %end ;
 
    run;
  ods pdf close;
  ods listing;
%mend ;