input, variables with different lengths and column starts

jdub — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:03:07 GMT

Hi I have some data that looks like:

order, businessname

1234,Acme

432,Bizarro

55689,Ralph's party town

In the title I mentioned that the variables have different lengths and column starts. By this I mean that the order numbers have different numbers of characters for each order and that the businessname observations start at different column positions.

I started my infile with a data step:

data order;

infile 'location.csv' dlm=',' firstobs=2;

input order businessname $;

run;

SAS infiles the first 8 characters of businessname but I am demanding and want the whole enchilada. If I knew the start column of businessname I would try to grab a field corresponding to businessname, i.e. something like $ 7-26 (Ralph's party town). The problem is that the Acme observation starts at column 6, Ralph's at column 7 and Bizarro at 5. How can I code an input statement for the businessname observations to flexibly accomdate this yet also grab all the characters in each observation?

thank you for your help

input, variables with different lengths and column starts

art297 — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:08:43 GMT

You could use:

data order;

infile 'location.csv' dlm=',' firstobs=2;

informat businessname $50.;

input order businessname;

run;

input, variables with different lengths and column starts

jdub — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:15:10 GMT

Thank you

topic input, variables with different lengths and column starts in SAS Programming

input, variables with different lengths and column starts

input, variables with different lengths and column starts

input, variables with different lengths and column starts