topic Re: Read in hyphen in SAS in SAS Studio

Read in hyphen in SAS

jc3992 — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 21:35:38 GMT

Hello everyone,

I have a data set with a variable "Age" looking like this:

Age

10-14

15-19

It is a tab-delimited data, so I use the code as below:

infile "&dirdata.SAS_Test/file_name.txt" delimiter="09"x DSD truncover firstobs=2;

But the printout would be a typo between 10 and 14 for the variable "Age",

and influence my following analysis as SAS would complain for invalid symbol.

Thank you very much for all the suggestions!

Thanks!

Re: Read in hyphen in SAS

PGStats — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 22:02:24 GMT

You should be able to read such data with:

data myData;
infile "&dirdata.SAS_Test/file_name.txt" delimiter="09"x DSD truncover firstobs=2;
input age$  /* other fields */;
run;

the $ tells SAS that age is a character variable.

Re: Read in hyphen in SAS

Cynthia_sas — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 22:04:33 GMT

Hi:

Your INPUT statement is more important in this case than you INFILE statement. Are you trying to read age as a numeric variable or as a character variable? The value 10-14 is NOT valid as a numeric value. You need to read it as character. I doubt that age is the only value in your data. When I made a small test file that is tab delimited with just name and age columns, I was able to read the age value correctly by using the program shown below:

Hope this helps,

Cynthia