topic Re: Porblem with unmatched double quotes using proc export in SAS Procedures

Porblem with unmatched double quotes using proc export

ad123123 — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 14:07:40 GMT

Hello All,

I am using proc export to export data into .csv file and facing some problem. In my data " is present.When I am exporting it using proc export , it is getting repeated 4 times and " becomes """". I have seen some solutions on this but unfortunately I need to fix this using proc export only. This happens only with " (unmatched double quotes). All other special characters like @,#,$ are exported correctly. I am using SAS 9.2 EG on Unix environment.

Can anyone helps me why proc export behaves like this and what is a solution for this?

Regards,

AD.

Re: Porblem with unmatched double quotes using proc export

RW9 — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 14:31:03 GMT

If your data contains ", then the output file needs to have more quotes to indicate that the overall string starts from and finishes at. E.g.

Abcde"efg

If I put one set of quotes round this:

"Abcd"efg"

Thats an invalid string, so need to add more quotes:

""Abcd"efg""

Basically if you want a file to look how you want, I would write the datastep to output it. Also check this post:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Procedures/Proc-Export-adding-extra-quotation-marks/td-p/90021

Re: Porblem with unmatched double quotes using proc export

ballardw — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 16:03:45 GMT

I have had to read files that some creatively modified the rules for quotes for delimited text such that I had values like

column1, "Some text with, and " in the middle", 45.3, column4 text.

And those break almost every standard import tool.

Manually write a couple of lines similar to what I show (or you seem to want). Then use proc import to read the file. Or import into Access or some other data base as a CSV and see what you get.

One might ask what you will do with the resulting file.