Read Multiple Text Files with FIeld Names

bh11 — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 19:07:07 GMT

Hi. I am attempting to use the methods outlined in this blog post:

https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2018/10/09/read-multiple-text-files/

to import multiple text files from a folder using a wildcard.

- Example Code from Blog Post Above -

data accel;
  infile "/home/chris.hemedinger/tsv/*.tsv" 
   dlm='09'x;
  length counter 8 
         timestamp 8 
         x 8 y 8 z 8 
         filename $ 25;
  input counter timestamp x y z filename;
run;

However, each of my files has field names in the first row and it appears that including the firstobs=2 option only applies to the first file contained in the folder. As a result, SAS is attempting to read in the first row of all my datasets (minus the first dataset) as data and I am getting a lot of messages in the log about invalid data.

At this point, I have included a conditional statement to later delete these unwanted rows. This method works, but I was wondering if there is a better method that communicates to SAS to skip the first row of every dataset it is attempting to read in.

Thanks!

Re: Read Multiple Text Files with FIeld Names

Reeza — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 19:26:00 GMT

You need to modify your INPUT statement slightly and you can use EOV/EOF (end of variable or end of file) to indicate the end of a file. See this skeleton code here: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/How-do-I-write-a-macro-to-import-multiple-text-files-that-have/ta-p/223627

topic Read Multiple Text Files with FIeld Names in SAS Programming

Read Multiple Text Files with FIeld Names

Re: Read Multiple Text Files with FIeld Names