topic Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data. in SAS Programming

Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

Stretlow — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:00:30 GMT

Hello there.

I'm a little stuck and was sondering if someone had a solution to my problem. Im on version 9.3

I have a text file that contains account numbers. These account numbers are all 16 digits long but are all in one row in the text file.

My question is, is there a way to create an observation for each of the 16 digit account numbers

so 123456788765432112345678876543211234567887654321

would become

1234567887654321

Many thanks in advance for any help

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:37:38 GMT

data want (keep=accountid);
infile 'path' lrecl=32000;
length line_in $ 32000;
input;
line_in = _infile_;
i = 1;
do until i > length(line_in)
  accountid = substr(line_in,i,16);
  output;
  i = i + 16;
end;
run;

Now, if you have no records at all (the file being one quasi-infinite stream):

data want;
infile 'path' lrecl=16 recfm=f;
input accountid $16.;
run;

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

RW9 — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:39:29 GMT

Well, you can read the file one character at a time, then an if statement to check length:

data want (drop=chr);
  length id $16;
  retain id;
  infile "s:\temp\rob\tmp.txt" recfm=n;
  input chr $char1.;
  id=cats(id,chr);
  if lengthn(id)=16 then do;
    output;
    id="";
  end;
run;

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

Stretlow — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:50:15 GMT

data want;
infile 'path' lrecl=16 recfm=f;
input accountid $16.;
run;

this worked except I had to remove
lrecl=16 recfm=f;

otherwise it didnt keep 16 for each record (some were 15)

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

Stretlow — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:52:21 GMT

Thank you for your swift responses on this, its appreciated

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

data_null__ — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:59:59 GMT

Show the log messages from both with and without LRECL and RECFM.

Seems to me that you may have record separaters that you are not aware and or other file qualities that you don't know.

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 12:31:16 GMT

In this case, I would take a more in-depth look at the file with a tool that shows all bytes (hexedit, hexdump or anything similar). It seems that you do have something that SAS treats as line separators.

Re: Reading a Txt file that is all one line of consistant data.

data_null__ — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 14:13:33 GMT

@Kurt_Bremser wrote:

In this case, I would take a more in-depth look at the file with a tool that shows all bytes (hexedit, hexdump or anything similar). It seems that you do have something that SAS treats as line separators.

SAS has tools for that too. One being the LIST; statement.