topic Re: Reading a space delimited file with names in SAS Programming

Reading a space delimited file with names

Sakthivel_Saran — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 07:29:23 GMT

Hi,

I have space delimited text file with spaces between two names. I want to use the infile option with delimiter as space and keep the name in the same column. Here is a snippet of the code I am having.

Agoura Hills 21127 290 290 0 3 5 48 64 155 15 0

and so on.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Reading a space delimited file with names

Astounding — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 09:46:37 GMT

There is one characteristic of the data that determines whether this is easy or difficult. If you have two spaces after the name(s) instead of one, the problem is simple:

data want;

infile rawdata;

length place $ 20;

input place & var1 var2 var3 ....;

run;

Some short but relatively complex programming can handle the situation if there is only one space after the name(s).

Re: Reading a space delimited file with names

Patrick — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 09:48:17 GMT

@Sakthivel_Saran

Based on what you've posted the delimiter is a string of two consecutive blanks. If this is true then the following code should work:

data sample;
  infile datalines truncover dlmstr='  ' dsd;
  input @;
  input name :$20. numvar1-numvar11;
datalines;
Agoura Hills  21127  290  290  0  3  5  48  64  155  15  0
Agoura  21127  290  290  0  3  5  48  64  155  15  0
;
run;