In addition to the response above, you can provide a little more detail. For example, when reading data into SAS from ASCII, you can use the LENGTH statement: LENGTH V1-V500 $6 V501-V700 8 V701-V900 $1; INPUT V1-V900; You can control the delimiter for the input or output file by using the DLM option: FILENAME TEXT "my documents\stuff\things.txt"; DATA WHATEVER; INFILE TEXT DLM="|" DSD LRECL=9999 MISSOVER; INPUT V1-V900; RUN; DLM tells SAS what to use as a separator; DSD tells SAS that consecutive separators imply a missing value. I always identify the input record length, because early on PC-SAS defaulted to (I seem to recall) 256 characters. You can use the DLM option on your FILE statement as well. As ballardw notes, you need to specify some LRECL value if you expect a long file. You can also create a fixed-format file by using variations on the PUT statement, e.g., DATA _NULL_; SET WORK.STUFF; FILE "MY DOCUMENTS\TEXT_STUFF.TXT" LRECL=999; PUT @1 ID @10 ADDRESS @50 PHONE; RUN;
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