topic Re: How to extract only the first column of data from a txt file in SAS EG? in SAS Programming

How to extract only the first column of data from a txt file in SAS EG?

Rhino84 — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 21:31:14 GMT

Hi All,

I have a txt file and i need to pick only the first value from the txt file in sas.

This is how the txt file header looks like:

ACC_ID Name Address phone_no email country

I want to extract just the ACC_ID data from this text file. The file is not delimited and the ACC_ID field is a numerical field (eg: 234908, 789087, 783420 etc)

Re: How to extract only the first column of data from a txt file in SAS EG?

Kurt_Bremser — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 06:27:15 GMT

We need to see your original data as is, not a description.

Open your text file with a text editor (e.g. Notepad) and copy/paste the first few lines into a window opened with this button:

Re: How to extract only the first column of data from a txt file in SAS EG?

Ksharp — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 10:34:41 GMT

Can you post some real data, so we can test the code .

Re: How to extract only the first column of data from a txt file in SAS EG?

Tom — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 16:11:23 GMT

@Rhino84 wrote:

Hi All,

I have a txt file and i need to pick only the first value from the txt file in sas.

This is how the txt file header looks like:

ACC_ID Name Address phone_no email country

I want to extract just the ACC_ID data from this text file. The file is not delimited and the ACC_ID field is a numerical field (eg: 234908, 789087, 783420 etc)

As long as each ACC_ID does not contain any spaces and there is at least one space between the ACC_ID and the NAME value then a simple INPUT statement should work fine.

You claim ACC_ID is numerical but why would you store an ID variable as a number? The Mean or Standard Deviation of an ID has no meaning.

data want;
  infile 'myfile.txt' firstobs=2;
  input acc_id :$10.;
run;

The FIRSTOBS=2 option on the INFILE statement is to skip the header row.

The : modifier before the informat is to make sure the INPUT only reads the first word on the line.

If you really need to make ACC_ID as numeric then just remove the :$10. from the INPUT statement.