topic Problem importing text file in SAS Programming

Problem importing text file

AbuChowdhury — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 20:29:07 GMT

Hi Experts,

My text files looks the following. When I am importing this file to SAS, then SAS file shows all variables in one column. How can I solve this?

PERMNO DATE CRSP Return

10001 20040416 20839 -0.003487

10001 20040419 20840 0.051085

10001 20040420 20841 -0.087883

Patrick — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 23:15:43 GMT

By choosing the correct delimiter. Is it a TAB or 1 to n blanks? Are you using a data step or Proc Import?

AbuChowdhury — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:15:21 GMT

I think this is 1 to n blanks. Using both data step and proc import shows all variables in one column.

Tom — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:15:39 GMT

If your file is that simple then just write the data step to read. If you use an importing tool it will have to guess at what variable types to use.

data want ;

infile 'myfile' firstobs=2 truncover ;

input PERMNO DATE CRSP Return;

informat date yymmdd8.;

format date yymmddN8. ;

run;

Reeza — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:18:35 GMT

What does your code look like?

AbuChowdhury — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 03:30:50 GMT

Now it works. Thanks a lot to Tom, Reeza and Patrick.