topic Blanks in column name in SAS Programming

Blanks in column name

znhnm — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 02:10:57 GMT

Hi, I uploaded a CSV file to SAS Studio, but this file has a column name with blank between two words. It causes problems when writing code referring to this variable. Is there a way to rename the variable to remove the blank so that I can refer to this column in my code? Thnak you!

Re: Blanks in column name

SASKiwi — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 03:01:30 GMT

There are at least three ways of dealing with this:

remove the blanks from the CSV file and re-import the data
run this statement to change the default behaviour (required in every submit): options validvarname = v7;
rename the column once imported:

data want;
  set have;
  rename 'My Column with blanks'n = My_Column_without_blanks;
run;

Re: Blanks in column name

andreas_lds — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 07:13:48 GMT

Don't use proc import, write a data step reading the file.

Re: Blanks in column name

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 07:54:06 GMT

Don't use PROC IMPORT, write the DATA step yourself. IMPORT is not needed for text files and causes unnecessary problems. See thousands of posts here.

As a stopgap measure, set

options validvarname=v7;

before PROC IMPORT.