Date:         Wed, 11 Dec 2002 13:41:50 -0500
Reply-To:     Ian Whitlock <WHITLOI1@WESTAT.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Ian Whitlock <WHITLOI1@WESTAT.COM>
Subject:      Re: recruiting cheesy, sleasy SAS tricks
Comments: To: Larry Bertolini <bertolini.1@OSU.EDU>
Comments: cc: "michael@BASSETTCONSULTING.COM" <michael@BASSETTCONSULTING.COM>,
          "myr_rose@YAHOO.COM" <myr_rose@YAHOO.COM>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Larry,

Leave a little room for sleaze here.  I don't know about the two bytes, but
I often use

   infile in lrecl = 32767 ;

when too impatient or unable to calculate and have never run into a problem
or noticed any degradation of performance.  I guess it chews up some memory,
but so far not in a way that I have had to care about.  Perhaps some
operating systems will extract a cost that would put this in the category of
a bad habit.  I suspect the real importance of the LRECL specification comes
from the dinosaur days when it determined the record in a fixed block
segment.

IanWhitlock@westat.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Bertolini [mailto:bertolini.1@OSU.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 1:07 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: how to input a long var into SAS without missing any words


Rose wrote:

> Greetings to all,
>
> I tried to input a tab delimited file into SAS by using infile
> statement:
>
> filename one "d:";
> data aa;
> infile one firstobs=2 dlm='09'x missover  dsd  lrecl=400;
> length char  $400;
> input char $ aa $ bb $;
> run;
>
> since the var char is long, so I use the lrecl option, and try to
> input it completely,
> but there is always a word missing whatever I use lrecl=256 or
> lrecl=400, they are the same result.
>

If variable "char" can be up to 400 bytes, can we assume that
the maximum record length could be >400?  Try specifying an
LRECL that is the sum of:
   max length of each variable
  + number of delimiters
  + 2   (For CR-LF; don't know if it's necessary, but if it's an
    extravagance, it's a small one.  Right now, I don't have time
    to prove/disprove it's necessity.)

I suggest that you also specify a length for variables "aa" and "bb".

>
> do you know how to input a long var into SAS without missing any
> words?
>
> thanks advance.
>
> Rose