Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 16:38:15 +0100
Reply-To: Peter Crawford <peter.crawford@DB.COM>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Peter Crawford <peter.crawford@DB.COM>
Subject: Re: reading raw data
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
You don't need any programs for this !
To examine raw data, try the command string
(in the sas display manager)
fslist 'your file' ; cols; nums; hex
It is good for up to 32K bytes wide,
has 5digit line number column (you just get *****
when there are too many llines)
It is *great* for a quick view !
I place the "cols; nums; hex" on a function key for fslist.
reducing typing of the command string to
fsl 'my file'
( fsl is an abbreviation for fslist, acceptable in
most sas windows)
Datum: 09/09/2002 23:58
An: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Antwort an: Talbot Katz <TopKatz@MSN.COM>
Betreff: reading raw data
Nachrichtentext:
Hi, gang.
It's your friendly twelve-year SAS novice back with another round of
questions I should have known the answers to at least ten years ago.
When I get a new flat data file, I usually like to inspect a few records
before reading into SAS data sets. Sometimes the files are too big to open
with any of the editors I have around, so I try to use SAS to look at
them. Ideally, I'd love to get output which looks like the SAS output that
you get when you make a mistake reading something in -- you know, where it
shows you each character in each column, even giving ascii or ebcdic codes
along with the standard characters. Is there a way to get SAS to do this
without having to make an error?
Here's something I did recently. I had a file which was supposed to have
records of length between 200 and 250 characters, with 27 data fields,
delimited by a '~' character. I wrote the following program :
data test ;
infile "test.txt" missover lrecl = 32767 firstobs = 1 lastobs = 10 ;
informat ir1 $char50. ;
informat ir2 $char50. ;
informat ir3 $char50. ;
informat ir4 $char50. ;
informat ir5 $char50. ;
input @ 1 ir1 $
@ 51 ir2 $
@101 ir3 $
@151 ir4 $
@201 ir5 $
;
put ir1 ;
put ir2 ;
put ir3 ;
put ir4 ;
put ir5 ;
run ;
I thought the char50 informat would make sure everything got scooped up,
but I knew something was wrong in the printout, because each record stopped
as soon as there was a blank space.
So I tried changing the input statement to :
input @ 1 ir1 $char50.
@ 51 ir2 $char50.
@101 ir3 $char50.
@151 ir4 $char50.
@201 ir5 $char50.
;
That helped, but some records came out short in the output, and because
they split in the middle of numeric fields at the right end, I knew the
problem was at the left end -- leading blanks weren't being printed.
So I changed the output statements to :
put @1 ir1 $char50. ;
etc.
That printed out the first four fields, ir1 - ir4 correctly, but the last
one, ir5, kept coming out blank. Luckily for me, the log told me that the
minimum and maximum length records were the same size, in this case, 214.
So, I changed all the "$char50." designations for ir5 to "$char14." and
then it printed out something for the last field; it's probably correct,
but I'm not sure, because the last twelve characters come out blank. Now,
maybe they are blank, but then would SAS report them as part of the record
length?
I think the file was just a standard windows ascii text file. Does SAS
report unprintable characters, like carriage return and line feed, as part
of the record length? Does SAS count trailing blanks as part of the record
length?
Thanks!
-- TMK --
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