Trying to break up variable string within a cell

[r4321]

Most cells have a length of 10 ...and will have more depending on how many code groups are in a cell. The data was taken into sas via excel. A database that Im pulling from only spits out in excel files, so it had to be done this way. However, it is weird that it assigns a correct character length to the first substring of '4' when I do the substring command...However, I have to specify the length at 6 if i want to get the next set of 4 numbers.

Thanks for your help.

[ballardw]

Here is something to consider when an application "only spits out Excel": Try opening one of the files with a text editor. You might be surprised that a number of applications actually create CSV, tab delimited or XML files but name them with an XLX or XLXS extension so that Excel will be the default application to open them. That might give you more options to deal with the files.

If you search this forum you'll find folks that are doing that with SAS output creating files in HTML or XML (and other formats) but using file names that end in XLXS to open the results in Excel.