Read in hyphen in SAS

[jc3992]

Hello everyone,

I have a data set with a variable "Age" looking like this:

Age

10-14

10-14

15-19

.

.

.

It is a tab-delimited data, so I use the code as below:

infile "&dirdata.SAS_Test/file_name.txt" delimiter="09"x DSD truncover firstobs=2;

But the printout would be a typo between 10 and 14 for the variable "Age",

and influence my following analysis as SAS would complain for invalid symbol.

Thank you very much for all the suggestions!

Thanks!

[PGStats]

You should be able to read such data with:

data myData;
infile "&dirdata.SAS_Test/file_name.txt" delimiter="09"x DSD truncover firstobs=2;
input age$  /* other fields */;
run;

the $ tells SAS that age is a character variable.

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:

  Your INPUT statement is more important in this case than you INFILE statement. Are you trying to read age as a numeric variable or as a character variable? The value 10-14 is NOT valid as a numeric value. You need to read it as character. I doubt that age is the only value in your data. When I made a small test file that is tab delimited with just name and age columns, I was able to read the age value correctly by using the program shown below:

Hope this helps,

Cynthia