holding SAS value using @

[Siddharth123]

Hi All,

Sometimes when I hold the value of a variabe in SAS, I am unsure where to use the trailing @ as I get an error when reading other variables. I use this as an example:

Suppose I want to read this text tab delimited file:

Andrew Rapayer 45 61

Abbey Murrey 10 9

Tina Amber 10 20

I should hold the value of Andrew Rapayer and then read off the next two values using @. The code I use:

Data test;

infile "C:\SAS\test.txt" dlm = ' ';

input Name & : $15. @

        Age : 2.

        Height : 2.

;

run;

Since I am using dlm ='' option so each value is seperated by a space so when I read first obs from text file it would treat Andrew & Rapayer as seperate values but I want to input that as Name so I am using & to read this and then hold the value using @ but I get an error when reading the Age:

ERROR 22-232 : Expecting a Name.

Kindly advise what is the missing link.

Kind Regards

SK

[Scott_Mitchell · Accepted solution]

From what I understand, using the ampersand special character/modifier won't help you anyway.  When using this modifier SAS treats two or more spaces as the end of the string, which you don't have in your sample data.