Although it is subtle, the difference is there:
Use notepad to save the following lines as a text file labeled emplist.txt:
LANGKAMM SARAH E0045 Mechanic
TORRES JAN E0029 Pilot
SMITH MICHAEL E0065
LEISTNER COLIN E0116 Mechanic
TOMAS HARALD
WADE KIRSTEN E0126 Pilot
WAUGH TIM E0204 Pilot
then run the following:
DATA test1;
INFILE "/folders/myfolders/emplist.txt" missover;
INPUT lastn $1-21 Firstn $ 22-31
Empid $32-36 Jobcode $37-45;
RUN;
DATA test2;
INFILE "/folders/myfolders/emplist.txt" truncover;
INPUT lastn $1-21 Firstn $ 22-31
Empid $32-36 Jobcode $37-45;
RUN;
You can find an explanation in the paper at:
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi26/p009-26.pdf
HTH,
Art
Editor's Note: See also this topic in SAS documentation about MISSOVER, TRUNCOVER, STOPOVER and FLOWOVER.
And this explanation from @Tom:
The difference is what it does when there are not enough characters for the input that you requested.
An easy test is to read in a text file using this input statement.
input line $80. ;
With missover you will get a missing value if the line does not have at least 80 characters (counting trailing spaces). With truncover you get the first 80 characters of the line, even for short lines. Your example works the same with MISSOVER and FLOWOVER because you did not specify a specific number of characters to read in your INPUT statement.
