topic Reading CSV file with variable term strings (CR and CRLF) in SAS Programming

Reading CSV file with variable term strings (CR and CRLF)

Quentin — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:11:58 GMT

I have a CSV file where some records end with CR, and other records end with CRLF. Luckily, there are no embedded CR or CRLF.

So file is like below (actual file has pipe-delimited records with variable lengths, variable number of fields, etc).

1 CRLF
2 CR
3 CRLF
4

I need to read the file using SAS 9.4 on Windows. I had hope that I could specify on the INFILE statement multiple delimiters, something like termstr=CR|CRLF. But seems that isn't allowed. Now I thinking I could just read in the file with termstr=CR, and then remove the LF from the data. Something like:

data want ;
  infile "c:\junk\have.txt" termstr=CR;
  input @; 
  _infile_ = compress(_infile_,'0A'x); 
  input x 1. ;
run ;

Before I go too far down this path, wanted to ask about possible better alternatives.

Re: Reading CSV file with variable term strings (CR and CRLF)

Tom — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:34:00 GMT

That should work.

But are you sure that you don't actually have a file with CRLF as end of line and some string fields with embedded CR values?

Re: Reading CSV file with variable term strings (CR and CRLF)

Quentin — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:41:37 GMT

Thanks Tom. Yes, pretty sure. : )

Re: Reading CSV file with variable term strings (CR and CRLF)

Ksharp — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 13:15:37 GMT

@Quentin

Very interesting Question.

How about make LF as a delimiter ?

data x;
infile 'c:\temp\test.txt' termstr=cr dlm='200A'x;
input x ;
run;