topic Re: Reading a text file with repeating structure in SAS Programming

Reading a text file with repeating structure

Norman21 — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 09:33:08 GMT

Hi,

I have a text file with a repeating structure, and am having difficulty importing it using either infile or proc import. Each line ends with a CR LF.

This is what I have:

first line (to be skipped)

<blank>

10:02:03

some text, that might contain commas or semicolons

<blank>

10:02:04

some more text

<blank>

10:02:07

yet more text

etc.

This is what I want:

Var1 Var2 Var3

1 10:02:03 some text, that might contain commas or semicolons

2 10:02:04 some more text

3 10:02:07 yet more text

etc.

This should be simple but it has me stumped! Can anyone help?

Re: Reading a text file with repeating structure

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 10:12:12 GMT

data want;
infile "yourfile" termstr=CRLF truncover;
input; /* skips blank line */
input var1; /* numeric */
input var2 time8.; /* time */
format var2 time8.;
input var3 $100.; /* text, adapt length to maximum expected */
run;

This will work as long as the 4-line sequence is reliably kept; if the sequence might change, further measures are necessary.

Re: Reading a text file with repeating structure

Norman21 — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 10:50:02 GMT

Multiple INPUT statements! That never occurred to me.

KurtBremser, your solution worked after one minor modification (adding firstobs=2 to the infile statement).

Thanks a million!