topic Re: Extracting a portion of a text file name to incorporate into the file itself in SAS Programming

Extracting a portion of a text file name to incorporate into the file itself

SASGeek — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 20:08:02 GMT

Hello all,

I'm pulling in several text files (up to 100) stored on our SAS server that has a date on the file name that I need to incorporate into the imported file itself.

For example: From the infile statement below I need to extract the 20230221 portion of the file name and insert it as a variable into the file I'm creating. There is no rhyme or reason for the date sequence, just the date it's run on.

If I knew how to extract that date I could put it into a do-loop and run it that way. But the question is: how do I extract that file the file name for 100 text files?

Thanks!

INFILE '/sasdata/US/Sales/Weekly_Sales_20230221.txt'
LRECL=32767
FIRSTOBS=2
ENCODING="LATIN1"
DLM='09'x
MISSOVER
DSD ;

Re: Extracting a portion of a text file name to incorporate into the file itself

SASKiwi — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:49:07 GMT

How are you creating the INFILE statement in the first place? Is it maintained manually or is it generated automatically? In any case just add the FILENAME option on your INFILE statement and the variable you specify will contain the name of the file you are reading:

INFILE '/sasdata/US/Sales/Weekly_Sales_20230221.txt'
FILENAME = MyFile
LRECL=32767
FIRSTOBS=2
ENCODING="LATIN1"
DLM='09'x
MISSOVER
DSD ;

Re: Extracting a portion of a text file name to incorporate into the file itself

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 06:05:03 GMT

Two things to keep in mind:

the variable created by the FILENAME= option is temporary and not included in the dataset; you need to create another one for storage in the dataset
define the length of the variable(s) before the INFILE statement, so they don't default to $8