SAS: Reading Data from tab delimited txt file

Read tab delimited txt file to sas.

data admit;
length name $14.;
infile ‘C:\Users\Documents\My SAS Files(32)\9.3\Tutorial\admit.txt’ dlm=’09’x firstobs =2  ;
input ID $4. name $ sex $1. age date height weight actlevel $4. fee;
run;

• missing value in the txt file should be either . or blank space.
• use dlm=’09’x to read the tab delimited file
• SAS default character variable length is 8. In order to read the name variable, need to add length statement before the infile statement, otherwise the name field will be truncated at 8.
• add firstobs =2 if the first line in the txt file is the variable names.
• use lrecl= 32760 if the observation is very long (longer than the default 256).

Read only certain observations that meet the criteria from the tab delimited file to sas.

Method1:

data admit;
length name $14.;
infile 'C:\Users\Documents\My SAS Files(32)\9.3\Tutorial\admit.txt' dlm='09'x firstobs =2;
input ID $4. name $ sex $1. @;
if sex = 'F' then delete;
input age date height weight actlevel $4. fee;
run;

Method2:

data admit;
length name $14.;
infile 'C:\Users\irisan\Documents\My SAS Files(32)\9.3\Tutorial\admit.txt' dlm='09'x firstobs =2;
input ID $4. name $ sex $1. @ ;
if sex = 'M' then do;
input  age date height weight actlevel $4. fee;end;
else delete;
run;

• use 2 input statements to select ‘M’ admits.
• in the first input statement, use one trailing @ to tell SAS to hold the record for if statement. In method 1, the ‘F’ records will not be passed on to the second input statement.
• for tab delimited data, it is not possible to only input selected variables from the source file.  All the variables need to be input in the variable sequence of source file from left to right.