topic Issues inputting RECID data in SAS Programming

Issues inputting RECID data

westbestern — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 20:32:59 GMT

I'm having trouble inputting recid data into SAS. Here is my first 10 lines of code:

data recid;
   input id$ week arrest$ fin$ age race$ wexp$ mar$ paro$ prio educ$;
   cards;
1       20      1       0       27      1       0       0       1	3	3
2       17	1	0	18	1	0	0	1	8	4
3	25	1	0	19	0	1	0	1	13	3
4	53	0	1	23	1	1	1	1	1	5
5	53	0	0	19	0	1	0	1	3	3
6	53	0	0	24	1	1	0	0	2	4
7	23	1	0	25	1	1	1	1	0	4
8	53	0	1	21	1	1	0	1	4	3
9	53	0	0	22	1	0	0	0	6	3
10	53	0	0	20	1	1	0	0	0	5
;
run;

The output, however, ends up looking like this

id week arrest fin age race wexp mar paro prio educ

1 1 20 1 0 27 1 0 0 1 3 3 2 17 1 01

What's going on here?

Re: Issues inputting RECID data

Reeza — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 20:50:52 GMT

Looks like you have a tab as a delimiter instead of spaces? Or fixed width possibly?

Try adding this lines and seeing if it helps:

infile cards dlm='09'x DSD TRUNCOVER;

This will tell SAS the delimiter is a tab. FYI - you're reading in numeric data as a character in some places (educ, paro) is that what you want to do?

Re: Issues inputting RECID data

westbestern — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 20:54:01 GMT

the infile statement worked perfectly!! thank you! and yes, educ and paro are both categorical variables.

Re: Issues inputting RECID data

Reeza — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 21:03:47 GMT

Categorical doesn't mean they need to be character.

In fact, if you want them to sort and have them as a character, it'll sort alphabetically, ie 1, 10, 11, 12 while numbers will sort correctly.

You can use formats to apply any descriptive labels and the CLASS statement will take both numeric/character variables when you need to specify variables as categorical.