Hi:
"\tab" is an RTF control string for indicating a TAB. If you look at your tab-delimited file with NOTEPAD, you should see spaces and not \tab.... like this
My
c:\temp\tab_dlm.txt file as it looks in Notepad (those spaces between each field are an expanded "tab" character '09'x -- which I can verify by looking at the input file with a hexadecimal viewer):
[pre]
'aaa' 'something' 'something else'
'bbb' 'morestuff' 'even more'
[/pre]
It is sounding to me as though you need to work with Tech Support on this issue, since I'm not sure you actually have a tab-delimited file. Tech Support is best able to look at the contents of your input file to determine whether you have real tab characters (ASCII '09'x) or RTF control characters (\tab).
To send a question to Tech Support, go to
http://support.sas.com/ and in the left-hand navigation pane, click on the link entitled "Submit a Problem". Alternately, you can go directly to the Tech Support Problem Form here:
http://support.sas.com/ctx/supportform/createForm
cynthia