PROC JSON list of strings

[ahmedmady94]

Hello,

I am trying to get a list of strings using proc json like below:

proc json out=json_in pretty;
export work.tweets /
nokeys nosastags;
run;

I get the result as list of lists

[

['a'],

['b'],

['c']

]

I want the result to be list of strings like that:

[ 'a',

'b',

'c']

the file tweets contains only one column called tweets containing strings a, b, c

 Is that possible using proc json?

[Tom · Accepted solution]

Don't know about the PROC but it should be trivial in a DATA step.

data _null_;
  file json_in ;
  set tweets end=eof;
  if _n_=1 then put '[' @;
  else put '.' @;
  put tweets :$quote. ;
  if eof then put ']' ;
run;

Which will generate a nice pretty file like:

["a"
,"b"
,"c"
]

Instead of one with the commas in the wrong place.

If your values might include double quote characters you will need to confirm that the method the $QUOTE form uses to protect those characters is appropriate for a JSON file.  When the character used to quote a string appears in a string the normal way in SAS to indicate that is to double the embedded character.  So a string like He said, "Hello". will appear as

"He said, ""Hello""."

[ahmedmady94]

Thank you so much. That's so helpful.