topic Re: Getting unwanted special character \n in one of the variable in SAS Procedures

Getting unwanted special character \n in one of the variable

VVDR — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 22:42:36 GMT

Hi All,

Good day !!!

When I am extracting the data directly from AWS S3 to SAS, I am getting a special character only to few observations and that is not expected and not present in the source.

Ex: For Column ID=100, In the Description variable value I am getting like this below.

" This is has to be state level \n information to get the business \n details \n "

Something like this.

Please advise what could be the reason. Column Description has 2000 character Length defined in the Dataset attributes level.

Please advise.

Thanks

Re: Getting unwanted special character \n in one of the variable

ballardw — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 22:58:14 GMT

@VVDR wrote:

Hi All,

Good day !!!

When I am extracting the data directly from AWS S3 to SAS, I am getting a special character only to few observations and that is not expected and not present in the source.

Ex: For Column ID=100, In the Description variable value I am getting like this below.

" This is has to be state level \n information to get the business \n details \n "

Something like this.

Please advise what could be the reason. Column Description has 2000 character Length defined in the Dataset attributes level.

Please advise.

Thanks

How are you looking at the data that leads you to believe "not present in the source"? If it is a viewer application from the source does that row display text in that variable/field/column on 3 lines in the data? If so those may be instructions for that viewer to display the following text on a "new line". The characters are there just not displayed in some application.

You can remove them in a data step with code like:

data example;
   x=" This is has to be state level \n  information to get the business \n details \n ";
   x=compbl(tranwrd(x,'\n','') );
run;

Re: Getting unwanted special character \n in one of the variable

VVDR — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 03:58:19 GMT

Hi ballardw,
Thanks for your quick reply. And what you have advised is absolutely correct. In the upstream it is divided the observation value into 3 lines and sas is separating it with \n.
Thanks again for sharing the knowledge.

Regards