On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:40:45 -0800, james.p.campbell@GMAIL.COM wrote:

>Hello -- > >I have a file with fixed-width data, and the variables are padded with >spaces, for example > >Value1 Value2 Value3 >Val_a Val_b Val_c > >I read in the file using an infile statement: >infile line $27.; > >and I want to extract the contents of the first variable. However, >using substr(line,1,9), gives me only "Value1" and "Val_a" without the >trailing spaces. How can I preserve them? > >As a note, simply breaking the data apart at the infile, e.g. >infile var1 $9. var2 $9. var3 $9.; > >seems to have the same problem.

Hi, James,

If you do below, then you are creating a character type variable, var1, of the length of 27 characters, since the variable, line, is of 27-character long.

var1 = substr(line, 1, 9);

So, the way I look at it, you not only have the trailing blanks, but you have many more than you seem to expect. :-)

The second method:

infile var1 $9.;

will indeed create a variable with a length of 9 characters. The $9 informat, however, will trim the leading blanks. But it will keep the "trailing" blanks.

Well, I should have said, first, that in SAS, once the character values are assigned to a variable, then there is no difference between the trailing blank characters and nothing -- since SAS's character variable is of a fixed length and is always padded right by blank characters. For example, if a variable is of length $5, then any of the following assignments will result in the same character values stored, namely "abc" followed by two space characters.

length var1 $5; var1 = "abc"; var1 = "abc "; var1 = "abc ";

I am not sure if this makes sense to you, but hope it helps at least a bit...

Cheers, Chang