Your whole program does not make any sense.
Your approach of trying to say that variable 3 starts at a specific character in the source file does not make any sense for delimited file. The delimiters are what determine where the values are, not hard coded character positions like you see in a fixed format text file.
What is the goal of the whole project.
If you want to get a dataset that only has one of the variables from the source file it is probably best to first read the whole file first and then use a KEEP statement to keep the variables you want. You really don't save anything by trying to only read some of the columns since you have to physically read the whole text file anyway.
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