topic Adding sequence numbers to filenames.. in SAS Programming

Adding sequence numbers to filenames..

Aidaan_10 — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 02:30:21 GMT

Hi,

I need help in generating sequential numbers to filename.

Example filename fileref "path#.ext";

(where # will be the file sequence number)

How do I obtain this? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Re: Adding sequence numbers to filenames..

ScottBass — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 02:44:52 GMT

@Aidaan_10 wrote:
Hi,
I need help in generating sequential numbers to filename.
Example filename fileref "path#.ext";
(where # will be the file sequence number)

How do I obtain this? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Can you supply more context? Otherwise this works:

filename fileref "path1.txt";

%let num=1;

filename fileref "path&num..txt";

Will temporary files help?

filename fileref temp;

Then reference the file via the fileref only. See the doc for details.

Re: Adding sequence numbers to filenames..

Aidaan_10 — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 02:50:12 GMT

Hi Scott,
Thanks for the reply but these are not temporary files. We load the data file every now and then with same names so I need to add a sequence number to them.

Re: Adding sequence numbers to filenames..

ScottBass — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 03:39:06 GMT

Edit: What I mean by context is:

* Are you looping in a macro?

* Do you need to create multiple files from a single data step?

* Can you supply the relevant code excerpts?

* Etc...

You still haven't added context, so this will be my last guess:

* get path to work directory ;
%let work=%sysfunc(pathname(work));

* create some dummy files ;
data _null_;
   length file $200;
   do i=1 to 5;
      file=cats("&work","\foo",i,".txt");
      file foo filevar=file;
      put 'x';
   end;
run;

* get list of files ;
%dirlist(dir=&work, filter=basename=:'foo' and ext='txt')
%let num=%nobs(dirlist);

* create more files ;
data _null_;
   length file $200;
   retain num &num;
   do i=1 to 5;
      num+1;
      file=cats("&work","\foo",num,".txt");
      file foo filevar=file;
      put 'x';
   end;
run;

https://github.com/scottbass/SAS/blob/master/Macro/dirlist.sas

https://github.com/scottbass/SAS/blob/master/Macro/nobs.sas

Adjust to suit. For example, you might need to parse dirlist --> filename to get max suffix.

Another approach is to just start a counter=1, use the fileexist function to check for existence of foo<counter>.txt, and increment counter until file does not exist. This should perform ok unless you had thousands of foo<counter>.txt files in your output directory.

Good luck!

Re: Adding sequence numbers to filenames..

andreas_lds — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 07:41:14 GMT

@Aidaan_10 wrote:
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the reply but these are not temporary files. We load the data file every now and then with same names so I need to add a sequence number to them.

Are you talking about dataset-names or filenames?

If you are talking about dataset-names, have a look at Understanding Generation Data Sets