topic Re: Basic Question in SAS Programming

Max no of delimiters on INFILE statement

Sanchit_goyal — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 09:34:10 GMT

How many delimiters can we define in dlm = '' option in the infile statement ?

Re: Basic Question

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 07:15:20 GMT

See the documentation of the INFILE Statement

You can define multiple delimiting characters with the DLM= option.

Re: Basic Question

Sanchit_goyal — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 07:27:13 GMT

but there is a specific number to it right, like I guess 200 or 256 delimiters we can mention in delimiter option in the infile statement

Re: Basic Question

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 08:30:38 GMT

Well, with 256 delimiters there's nothing left to delimit, so that's not even a limit that makes sense.

For all practical purposes, there is no limit you need to take care of, and there is none mentioned in the documentation.

Re: Basic Question

ballardw — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 14:30:27 GMT

@Sanchit_goyal wrote:
but there is a specific number to it right, like I guess 200 or 256 delimiters we can mention in delimiter option in the infile statement

Delimiters are single character. So too many delimiters, to get to 200 you would exhaust every letter, digit and punctuation character, means practically every character is a delimiter. Which is likely to be particularly useless as you would not have much data when done.

Examine the result of this code using many delimiters:

data example;
   infile datalines dlm=' abcdefABCDEF123456' missover;
   input x $   ;
datalines;
abc
123
a1b2c3
aaa 333
;

Or are you wanting the DLMSTR option where groups of characters are a single delimiter?