I have data from a national survey database that I received in a txt file. The data is from written surveys that were electronically scanned in so it is a bit messy. The variables are separated by the delimiter |. Unfortunately, there are several string/free text variables throughout the datafile where the delimiter | mistakenly appears in place of similar-looking characters such as / and lower-case L; therefore, when I read the data in SAS breaks these variables into multiple variables. Besides using DSD, which doesn't work in this case, how can I tell SAS to ignore these erroneous delimiters when reading in my data? The preceding and following values are not consistent across cases so there is nothing to anchor an @character pointer or a find-and-replace command to. Some more information in case it helps is that the string variables which pose a problem are varying lengths, and the data breaks across cases so I must use FLOWOVER.     Here is an example of what my data looks like:   Var 1  Var 2                           Var 3        Var 4 12345|123 App|e Tree Lane|20051231|E1 67981|5th grade|6th grade|20091231|F2   ... View more