topic Re: PROC REPORT avoid splitting column value on word boundary in SAS Procedures

PROC REPORT avoid splitting column value on word boundary

Quentin — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:34:26 GMT

It looks like when PROC REPORT wraps a long text value, it will split values based on some word boundaries, e.g. "." and " ".

So:

data have ; 
  txt="AAAAAAAAAAAAA.BBBBBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCCCCCCC"  ;
run ;

ods pdf file="%sysfunc(pathname(work))/mypdf.pdf" ;
proc report data=have ;
  columns txt ;
  define txt /style(column)=[cellwidth=2in];
run ;
ods pdf close ;

Splits the text into 3 lines when it wraps, and gives me a PDF that looks like:

Is there an option where I can tell PROC REPORT not to split the value on any boundaries when it wraps? Perhaps a style option for a particular column that says something like IgnoreWordBoundaries?

Basically I want to save vertical space by allowing text to wrap in the middle of a "word". If the above example wasn't split on word boundaries, it would be two rows instead of 3.

Re: PROC REPORT avoid splitting column value on word boundary

Cynthia_sas — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:46:40 GMT

Hi:
There's no option like that that I know of except for fiddling with the width or explicitly using ODS ESCAPECHAR and {newline} to explicitly put your own linebreaks into the string.
Cynthia

Re: PROC REPORT avoid splitting column value on word boundary

Quentin — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 16:25:45 GMT

Thanks @Cynthia_sas. If you don't know of it, then I'm sure it's not there. Maybe I'll put it in as a ballot item. Of course for real words, breaking on word boundaries makes sense. But in this case I've got a column that shows the name of a file passed by the user. And they come up with some really creative long names with spaces and sometimes dots in them, that are wrapping funny. So I'd like to just treat it as a string of characters, rather than a string of words.