Hi PD,

Dedicated solutions (in or outside SAS) may be developed. I developed a general purpose data manipulation program, which is easily able to convert your example to: ---------converted-example--------- paula d address 1 new york ny 12345 Jason D address 1 boston MA 01234 Laura D address1 Chicago IL 60092 john d address1 ---------end-of-example--------- Note the remaining spaces before Jason.

If you think this is sufficient and want to apply this method, then download DATAFIX in http://home.hccnet.nl/jim.groeneveld/software/data/datfx231.zip unpack the ZIP files and issue the DOS command: datafix bad-text.in /X f=.\n c=\n\t /l | datafix T=bad-text.out /X f=\t c=\n where bad-text.in is your data file and bad-text.out is the resulting data file.

Good luck - Jim.

Y. (Jim) Groeneveld MSc Biostatistician Vitatron B.V. Meander 1051 6825 MJ Arnhem The Netherlands +31/0 26 376 7365; fax 7305 Jim.Groeneveld@Vitatron.com www.vitatron.com

-----Original Message----- From: PD [mailto:sophe88@YAHOO.COM] Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 04:39 To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Read in bad text file

I have a fixed length text file that is bad. Each record stats with a person's name, but returns to next line or the 3rd to end, before next names comes in line. Example is

paula d address 1 new york ny 12345 ....................... .................. Jason D address 1 boston MA 01234 .... .........Laura D address1 Chicago IL 60092................. .............................................john d address1 ...............

Is that anyway to read it so they will line up like

paula D address 1 jason d address 1 Laura d address 1 john d address 1

Thanks.

PD