topic Re: Blanks in file in SAS Programming

Blanks in file

RW9 — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:51:18 GMT

Hi,

Probably something simple, but have tried the options and can't seem to get it working. In a text file (RTF) I have some data fields with spaces in (asis=on from a proc report), looks like:

\pard\plain\intbl\sb0\sa0\ql\f1\fs18\cf1{Sometext {\line}

More Text {\line}

Even More Text\cell}

On an infile statement:

length buffer $2000.;

infile "S:\Temp\Rob\RTF\Current\FLT2504_DOSEA_L-0301-mh-rand.rtf" dsd missover lrecl=32767;

input buffer $;

These blanks are removed. Any thoughts on getting them to read in correctly?

Re: Blanks in file

LinusH — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 11:35:55 GMT

I have no isdea about the problem, attaching the rtf could help us test.

But why do you want to read an rtf created by SAS? Is this a rescue operation and the original data is not available?

Re: Blanks in file

data_null__ — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:02:48 GMT

You need to use an INFORMAT that does not trim leading blanks. Your INPUT BUFFER $; statement is using LIST input which you don't want. Looks like you want to read the whole line as a string. I use $VARYING informat with the LENGTH= option for the length variable. This is fine as long as LRECL is LE 32767 which I expect it will be for RTF. I have not seen RTF with LRECL anywhere near that.

Re: Blanks in file

RW9 — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:08:40 GMT

Thanks, knew its was something simple like that. Informat=$varying200. works fine.

In response to LinusH, thanks for your response, actually its an RTF parser, mainly for validation, but possibly for other things as well.