How do I prevent a missing value from being skipped?

WeenieHutJrs — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 04:35:17 GMT

I have a long and complicated dataset in a .txt file where I can get it to read the dataset and get most of the data in the correct positions in the output. However there is one character variable that sometimes is missing in the .txt file and rather than having no value for that variable in the output, the next variable is just shifted into the missing variable's slot screwing up the remaining data. How do I prevent that from happening while only using where statements in the data step? (var5 is my problem variable and using SAS OnDemand)

Example code:

data dataset;
infile example.txt dlm='09'x;
input number var1 $ var2 var3 $ var4 $ var5 $ var6 $ var7 $ var8 $ var9 $ var10 $ @;
drop number;
run;

From example.txt file

1 xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx
2 xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

3 xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

4 xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

5 xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

6 xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

Example output

var1 var2 var3 var4 var5 var6 var7 var8 var9 var10

xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx 2

xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

xxx 1234 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx 6

Re: How do I prevent a missing value from being skipped?

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 05:49:42 GMT

Add the DSD option to your INFILE statemeht. Two consecutive delimiters will then be read as a missing values.

topic How do I prevent a missing value from being skipped? in New SAS User

How do I prevent a missing value from being skipped?

Re: How do I prevent a missing value from being skipped?