Date:         Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:12:37 -0400
Reply-To:     Venky Chakravarthy <swovcc@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Venky Chakravarthy <swovcc@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Re: INFILE - reading to the ampersand and then stopping
Comments: To: mike.wilson8@COMCAST.NET

Do you know the maximum length of UI? If not you will have to make some
guesses and declare a length for your variables before reading them in.
Also since you have UI= and SI= as the starting pointers for your UI and SI
variables you may use them in your input. Finally in the varying length UI,
the & sign can be eliminated with some post processing. You can eliminate
the & in SI by simply declaring a length that stores only 6 characters as
the example seems to indicate.

data test ;
  length ip $14 ui $14 si $6 ;
  input ip $ @ "UI=" ui $ @ "SI=" si $ ;
  substr(ui,length(ui),1)=" " ;
  cards ;
57.8.114.82     UI=DS00000479608&       SI=CTPBLU&
57.8.114.82512  UI=0D9614&    SI=CTPBLU&
run ;

proc print ;
run ;

Yields:

Obs          ip          ui                 si

 1     57.8.114.82       DS00000479608    CTPBLU
 2     57.8.114.82512    0D9614           CTPBLU

Venky Chakravarthy

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:53:13 -0700, mike.wilson8@COMCAST.NET wrote:

>I have a data file that looks like this.
>
>57.8.114.82     UI=DS00000479608&       SI=CTPBLU&
>57.8.114.82512  UI=0D9614&    SI=CTPBLU&
>
>It's space delimted and is suppose to have 3 columns..IP, UI, SI
>
>Because the UI character length varies, I'm trying to  read the UI info
>and stop at the ampersand.
>
>When I initially suck the data in, it cuts off the UI info and only
>reads so many characters so this snippet of code doesn't work:  input
>IP$ UI$  SI$...doesn't read all the UI characters.
>
>I'm a newbie at this so any advice you have would be great.
>
>Thank you,
>Mike