@workoutpal wrote:
Thank you. This answers the specific question, and provides some insight on using the help interface. Unfortunately, this does not solve my problem of inputting data. I wish SAS would just give a preferred input format, and I would make it look like that as opposed to playing with their menus to make it input.
Unfortunately there are literally thousands of ways to create a file. SAS provides tools that are fairly flexible to bringing lots of formats but you pay for that flexibility with a certain amount of complexity.
I have used "dat" files that were 1) fixed column text, 2) tab delimited text, 3) pipe (| character) delimited text and 4) named input text where each value appears as variablename=123.45 or Name="John".
NOT my choice, that was the file provided. So having options that would allow reading them was nice as otherwise the text has to be reformatted to something "useable".
BTW once upon a time there were a lot of files with DAT extensions floating around that stood for "Digital Audio Tape" and recorded sound. Believe me, those were not going to be easily read by any data system generally.
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