topic Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once in SAS Programming

Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

srdhoble — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:24:07 GMT

Hi Team,

My requirement is to import many .txt files each with differant layout all at once.And to save them as sas datasets in work library.Can someone please help me on this.Thanks!

NOTE:I cannot make copy of files and store them in one temp location.File sizes are huge

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

Reeza — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:35:45 GMT

You can write a macro.

How do you know where the files are? Do you have a list, all in a folder?

http://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_ca/User%20Group%20Presentations/Victoria-User-Group/Macros-for-Beginners.pdf

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

PGStats — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 19:13:34 GMT

Where/How is the layout of your text files described?

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

srdhoble — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:02:16 GMT

These are pipe delimited .txt files. and all of them are distributed over 4 folder locations.

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

Reeza — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:56:03 GMT

1. Can proc import work or will you need a customized data step for each file?

If proc import works you can try and automate it.

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

srdhoble — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 22:15:27 GMT

Automating Proc import would be fine with me...any idea how to go about it?

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

Reeza — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 22:20:47 GMT

The first link I provided is a step by step instruction on how to do exactly that.

Re: Importing many txt files with differant layouts all in once

Reeza — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 22:27:53 GMT

You can use a script to determine all the files in the folder (Assuming Windows);

http://support.sas.com/kb/45/805.html

Once those are in a dataset you can call the import macro using call execute.

%macro import_text_file(path, out);
proc import data=&out datafile="&path" dbms=dlm;
delimiter='|'; getnames=yes;
run;

%mend;