topic Re: PROC JSON list of strings in SAS Procedures

PROC JSON list of strings

ahmedmady94 — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 10:05:34 GMT

Hello,

I am trying to get a list of strings using proc json like below:

proc json out=json_in pretty;
export work.tweets /
nokeys nosastags;
run;

I get the result as list of lists

[

['a'],

['b'],

['c']

]

I want the result to be list of strings like that:

[ 'a',

'b',

'c']

the file tweets contains only one column called tweets containing strings a, b, c

Is that possible using proc json?

Re: PROC JSON list of strings

Tom — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 16:22:46 GMT

Don't know about the PROC but it should be trivial in a DATA step.

data _null_;
  file json_in ;
  set tweets end=eof;
  if _n_=1 then put '[' @;
  else put '.' @;
  put tweets :$quote. ;
  if eof then put ']' ;
run;

Which will generate a nice pretty file like:

["a"
,"b"
,"c"
]

Instead of one with the commas in the wrong place.

If your values might include double quote characters you will need to confirm that the method the $QUOTE form uses to protect those characters is appropriate for a JSON file. When the character used to quote a string appears in a string the normal way in SAS to indicate that is to double the embedded character. So a string like He said, "Hello". will appear as

"He said, ""Hello""."

Re: PROC JSON list of strings

ahmedmady94 — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:57:23 GMT

Thank you so much. That's so helpful.