Getting the Correct Character Length using the List Method

[ManitobaMoose]

Ok, I know this is pretty basic. But I need to get this right.

When I already have a set, and I know the variable names, I can use the scan function. However, when doing original data list,

my problem here is that the Location, such as New Jersey, has a space, so I am using the &, but there are cases where a $15. informat, for shorter location names, included data in the name field. I could just manually place spaces after the name to make sure that there are no numbers in the name, but there must be a better way to do this? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Libname SasData '/folders/myfolders/SASData' ;
Data HIV_Surveillance ;
Input Residence_Location & $15.
      Reported_Cases     : 8.
      All_Cases          : 8. ;
Datalines ;
Atlanta  6355 14776
Baltimore 3490 10176
Boston 2769 9334

New Jersey 4893 9457
;

Above, 6355 ends up with the name Atlanta. I could just increase the spaces after atlanta to make up the 15 characters, but is there a better way to do this? Thanks!

[ballardw]

Here are two different ways one requires the dsd option and quoting the values with a space in the middle. Second has TWO, no need to pad to 15) spaces after the first variable for all records

Data HIV_Surveillance ;
infile datalines dsd dlm=' ';
informat Residence_Location  $15.
      Reported_Cases      8.
      All_Cases           8. ;
Input Residence_Location 
      Reported_Cases     
      All_Cases          ;
Datalines ;
Atlanta 6355 14776
Baltimore 3490 10176
Boston 2769 9334
"New Jersey" 4893 9457
;

Data HIV_Surveillance ;
input Residence_Location & :$15.
      Reported_Cases      :8.
      All_Cases           :8. ;
Datalines ;
Atlanta  6355 14776
Baltimore  3490 10176
Boston  2769 9334
New Jersey  4893 9457
;
run;

Better might be to use another delimeter such as , or ; instead of default space

[Ksharp]

Data HIV_Surveillance ;
input;
p=anydigit(_infile_);
Residence_Location=substr(_infile_,1,p-1);
      Reported_Cases=scan(substr(_infile_,p),1);
      All_Cases=scan(substr(_infile_,p),2);
      drop p;
Datalines ;
Atlanta  6355 14776
Baltimore 3490 10176
Boston 2769 9334
New Jersey 4893 9457
;


proc print;run;