topic Re: Please help me to get the VARIABLE OF VARYING LENGTH in SAS Programming

Please help me to get the VARIABLE OF VARYING LENGTH

Sathish_jammy — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:32:57 GMT

data example2;
infile cards delimiter = ' ' dsd;
length Name $30;
input Name$ ID Score;
cards;
Deepanshu Bhalla 22 987
AttaPat 217 564
Xonxiangnam Samnuelnarayan 33 544
;
proc print noobs;
run;

SAS Output

Name ID Score

Deepanshu Bhalla 22 987

Even if i use

length Name :$30; (the same partial O/P occur)

Re: Please help me to get the VARIABLE OF VARYING LENGTH

RW9 — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:41:26 GMT

You can't directly. What you have here is bad data. The reason it is bad is because the variables contain the "delimiter", which means there is no logical way to identify where a variable starts and where it finishes, hence it is bad data.

This illustrates good data, where the delimiter is distinct:

data example2;
  infile cards delimiter=',' dsd;
  length Name $30;
  input Name$ ID Score;
cards;
Deepanshu Bhalla,22,987
AttaPat,217,564
Xonxiangnam Samnuelnarayan,33,544
;
run;

Personally I would send the data back with a fail note, and how to correct it. Otherwise you will need to read in the data as text, then write some text parse statements to split it up as you want.

Re: Please help me to get the VARIABLE OF VARYING LENGTH

novinosrin — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:41:43 GMT

@Sathish_jammy you can certainly make SAS read your data as is without touching your values but of course data is a bad data regardless.

Re: Please help me to get the VARIABLE OF VARYING LENGTH

novinosrin — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:55:36 GMT

data example2;
infile cards delimiter = ' ' ;
input @;
length Name $30;
Name=substr(_infile_,1, anydigit(_infile_)-1);
input @(anydigit(_infile_)) ID score;
cards;
Deepanshu Bhalla 22 987
AttaPat 217 564
Xonxiangnam Samnuelnarayan 33 544
;