topic Creating variables dynamically in SAS Procedures

Creating variables dynamically

sss — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:52:58 GMT

hi all,

i want to import data from txt file into sas system.

The size of raw data file is to big,and the length of the record is also to big,what i know is that the values are separated by comma.

What problem i am facing is that i dont know how my variables values it holds in a record.it many 120 variables or even mre then that.

i want to access a variable values and want to create sas data set.

Creating variables dynamically

art297 — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:20:38 GMT

Does the data file have a header record that contains the variable names? Have you tried using proc import, indicating that it is a csv file? Have you looked at the raw file with a text editor like Wordpad (not Notepad, as it has a hard time with large files)?

Re: Creating variables dynamically

Tom — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:50:45 GMT

You can explore the content of your text file with SAS.

If you want to see what it looks like use the LIST statement in a data step. If there are any non-printable characters in the lines then SAS will show you the hex codes for those characters.

* Dump first 5 lines to the log ;

data _null_;

infile 'myfile.txt' lrecl=32676 ;

input;

list;

if _n_ >= 5 then stop;

run;

If you know that it is comma delimited then you try just pulling in a few rows into character variables and see what you have .

* Pull in first 50 columns for first 10 rows ;

data sample ;

infile 'myfile.txt' dsd dlm=',' truncover lrecl=32676 ;

length x1-x50 ;

input x1-x50 ;

if _n_ >= 10 then stop;

run;

If you have figured out how to read it and due to space issues you only want to keep a couple of columns then you could use a KEEP (or DROP) statement or dataset option.

data subset (keep=id age sex);

infile 'myfile.txt' dsd dlm=',' truncover ;

input id start end age weight height sex comment ;

run;