topic Difference between putting colon as a format modifier, before or after the informat in SAS Programming

Difference between putting colon as a format modifier, before or after the informat

Odyssey2001 — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 22:57:28 GMT

Hi,

SAP version 9.4

Data file (data.txt)

George
Albert
Bob

My SAS program to read the data above:

DATA Work.names;
	INFILE 
		'/folders/myfolders/exercices/data/data.txt'
		missover
	;
	INPUT name :$ 6.;
RUN;
PROC PRINT DATA = Work.names;
TITLE 'Names';
RUN;

It seems to me that:

INPUT name :$ 6.;

And (putting the colon after the $ character)

INPUT name $: 6.;

Both give the same result. As I'm a beginner I just wanted to know why. Is it just the fact that both syntaxes are accepted by SAS or there is some concept that I've missed?

Thanks in advance,

Re: Difference between putting colon as a format modifier, before or after the informat

Astounding — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 23:20:49 GMT

As you have seen, both work.

The order doesn't matter much because the colon is instructions for reading in the variable, but the dollar sign is defining characteristics of the variable. So they don't really conflict

SAS is pretty flexible in defining characteristics of a variable. This combination should also work:

length name $ 6;
input name : 6.;

The one thing that doesn't work is re-defining the length of a character variable after the fact. This would give an error:

input name $;
length name $ 6;

The INPUT statement would assign NAME a length of 8, and a later LENGTH statement can't change that.

Re: Difference between putting colon as a format modifier, before or after the informat

Odyssey2001 — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 12:49:13 GMT

Ok I see. Thank you very much for your help and your attention to my problem.