Don't want to remove trailing spaces

[Hercules]

Ok,

So I am trying to create a table in Teradata from Oracle using SAS.

When I do that, SAS by default remove the trailing spaces, but I want those spaces.

For example:

If I have a value as 026... (dot representing spaces here)

SAS load them into a Teradata table as : 026

How can I achieve that?

Thanks in advance.

[Ksharp]

Specify enough length for that variable , sas will add blanks after it automatically .

length var $ 20 ;

Xia Keshan

[Hercules]

Hello,

Thanks for the quick reply. Not even that working.

I tried first converting spaces into hashes by using TRANWRD and then replacing # by spaces again.

But when I do that, SAS converts all the non occupied places as spaces whether it was in the column value or not.

Approach I'm using is- Tranwrd(column1,"20"x,"#")

for eg, if the column1 has some values and length as 10 $

(Representing dot as spaces)

COLUMN1

Anant...

Sas.

Oracle

First it converts like-

Anant#####

Sas#######

Oracle####

But it should be like,

Anant###

Sas#

Oracle

[Ksharp]

sas will pad the blanks at the end of value until it reach the length of variable.So you will get

Anant#####

Sas#######

Oracle####

NOT

Anant###

Sas#

Oracle

[Hercules]

Then how can I have trailing spaces?

[SASKiwi]

I'm curious to know  the significance of the trailing blanks? If you are doing value comparisons you don't normally add trailing blanks if x = '026    '.

[Hercules]

My target column is a UPI in Teradata.

That's why it is discarding the other value I.e. 026 with blanks.

As there are two values of 026 and 026 with spaces.

[Ksharp]

How do you load them into a Teradata table ?

If it is SQL , specify its length as

select var length=10 ......... from ....

If it was data step, specify its length as

length var $ 10 ;

[Hercules]

I have tried that Xia,

That is also not working.

[jakarman]

Change the question as it as about SAS-Teradata not only SAS.  TD (Teradata) is a RDBMS having his own datatypes a tri-value-logic with nulls and different date-time formats supporting interval according to SQL:2013 whereas SAS is using SQL:99. That are a lot of differences.

Look at the SAS-TD access translation SAS/ACCESS(R) 9.4 for Relational Databases: Reference, Sixth Edition  char and varchar from TD to SAS are the same.  Going from SAS to TD the default is only CHAR

Review the TD varchar definition that one is removing trailing blanks when loading loading data. The active hardware compression for blanks at char fields having spaces could be as effective.

http://www.info.teradata.com/HTMLPubs/DB_TTU_14_00/index.html#page/Load_and_Unload_Utilities/B035_24...

Remember TD is a special one. Loading data to TD can have issues, they will not return as errors instead some dedicated tables are created having the erroneous ones.

[Hercules]

Hello Jaap,

I agree with you, but not only Teradata, even if I am making a data set in SAS, then also the spaces are not coming. Its like SAS is removing trailing spaces by default.

[jakarman]

No SAS is not removing the spaces, in contrary spaces are always added to fill it up to full fixed storage length. The fixed-storage like the char in TD.

This behavior is the reason why you need to trim (remove trailing spaces) before you can effective concatenate strings. Fixed=fixed there must be something there.

You must have some other issue. Describe it better with preferable some code showing that. 

[Hercules]

I just wrote a small data step.

Data;

Col1= 'Anant     ';

Col2= length(col1);

run;

When I copy paste the value Anant in a notepad, there is no trailing space.

also the length has given me 5 as output.

But it should be 10 (as I've given 5 spaces), right?

[Ksharp]

data x;

Col1= 'Anant     ';

Col2= lengthc(col1);

put Col2=;

run;

[Hercules]

Yes that is OK, but I don't only want to find the length.

my main concern is to read these two as different values.

If you write,

proc SQL;

select distinct col1 from x;

run;

Then the output will be-

Col1

Anant

But these are two different values.