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jdub
Calcite | Level 5

Hi I have some data that looks like:

order, businessname

1234,Acme

432,Bizarro

55689,Ralph's party town

In the title I mentioned that the variables have different lengths and column starts.  By this I mean that the order numbers have different numbers of characters for each order and that the businessname observations start at different column positions. 

I started my infile with a data step:

data order;

infile 'location.csv' dlm=',' firstobs=2;

input order businessname $;

run;

SAS infiles the first 8 characters of businessname but I am demanding and want the whole enchilada.  If I knew the start column of businessname I would try to grab a field corresponding to businessname, i.e. something like $ 7-26 (Ralph's party town).  The problem is that the Acme observation starts at column 6, Ralph's at column 7 and Bizarro at 5.  How can I code an input statement for the businessname observations to flexibly accomdate this yet also grab all the characters in each observation?

thank you for your help

2 REPLIES 2
art297
Opal | Level 21

You could use:

data order;

  infile 'location.csv' dlm=',' firstobs=2;

  informat businessname $50.;

  input order businessname;

run;

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