I am accessing an old mainframe database that has an unknown number of fields. Additionally, I have only a vague idea of the data some fields contain (and for some fields, I have no clue as to what's supposed to be in them).
Is there a way to print out all field headings and count the number of fields? I am thinking some kind of IF/THEN or DO/WHILE loop should do it, but I cannot find an argument to use for generic last column. It would also be nice, if I could tell how many characters are allocated to each field (how many columns per field).
Basically, I am trying to discover as much of the table structure as possible, but I am so new to SAS that I am not quite sure which generic arguments and procedures exist in the language, so any and all help will be heartily appreciated.
SAS at my disposal is a mainframe IBM version circa 1980 (with some newfangled 1997 updates) accessed via a dumb terminal, so please don't go crazy suggesting Windows SAS solutions. 🙂
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