PROC IMPORT Numeric Characters

[djbateman]

I am using PROC IMPORT to read in a .csv file.  I have a variable PATIENT that is a patient ID number.  My issue is that most of the entries are numbers, but the very last one has an "S" before it suggesting that this patient was screened from the study.  SAS hits that last record thinking that it should be a number, deletes it, and gives me an error message saying that import was unsuccessful.  Is there an option that I am not finding that will adjust the variable type if there are characters in a variable?

[art297 · Accepted solution]

I think your easiest solution would be to grab the code that proc import creates and simply modify it so that you are reading the field(s) as characters.

A nice artice on the method can be found at: http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi30/038-30.pdf

The article contains step-by-step instructions for accomplishing such a task.