Getting unwanted special character \n in one of the variable

[VVDR]

Hi All,

Good day !!!

When I am extracting the data directly from AWS S3 to SAS, I am getting a special character only to few observations and that is not expected and not present in the source. 

Ex: For Column ID=100, In the Description variable value I am getting like this below.

" This is has to be state level \n  information to get the business \n details \n "

Something like this.

Please advise what could be the reason. Column Description has 2000 character Length defined in the Dataset attributes level. 

Please advise. 

Thanks  

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

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@VVDR wrote:

Hi All,

Good day !!!

When I am extracting the data directly from AWS S3 to SAS, I am getting a special character only to few observations and that is not expected and not present in the source. 

Ex: For Column ID=100, In the Description variable value I am getting like this below.

" This is has to be state level \n  information to get the business \n details \n "

Something like this.

Please advise what could be the reason. Column Description has 2000 character Length defined in the Dataset attributes level. 

Please advise. 

Thanks  

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How are you looking at the data that leads you to believe "not present in the source"? If it is a viewer application from the source does that row display text in that variable/field/column on 3 lines in the data? If so those may be instructions for that viewer to display the following text on a "new line". The characters are there just not displayed in some application.

You can remove them in a data step with code like:

data example;
   x=" This is has to be state level \n  information to get the business \n details \n ";
   x=compbl(tranwrd(x,'\n','') );
run;

[VVDR]

Hi ballardw,
Thanks for your quick reply. And what you have advised is absolutely correct. In the upstream it is divided the observation value into 3 lines and sas is separating it with \n.
Thanks again for sharing the knowledge.

Regards