SAS 9.4 Language Reference, 6th Edition

Characters in the Data What to Use Reason

delimiters, blank characters, or

quoted strings

DSD option, with DLM= or

DLMSTR= option in the

INFILE statement

These options enable SAS

to read a character value

that contains a delimiter

within a quoted string;

these options can also

treat two consecutive

delimiters as a missing

value and remove

quotation marks from

character values.

Remember the following when reading character data:

• In a DATA step, when you place a dollar sign ($) after a variable name in the INPUT

statement, character data that is read from data lines remains in its original case. If

you want SAS to read data from data lines as uppercase, use the CAPS system option

or the $UPCASE informat.

• If the value is shorter than the length of the variable, SAS adds blanks to the end of

the value to give the value the specified length. This process is known as padding the

value with blanks.

Sources of Raw Data

Instream Data

The following example uses the INPUT statement to read in instream data:

data weight;

input PatientID $ Week1 Week8 Week16;

loss=Week1-Week16;

datalines;

2477 195 177 163

2431 220 213 198

2456 173 166 155

2412 135 125 116

;

Note: A semicolon appearing alone on the line immediately following the last data line

is the convention that is used in this example. However, a PROC statement, DATA

statement, or a global statement ending in a semicolon on the line immediately

following the last data line also submits the previous DATA step.

Instream Data Containing Semicolons

The following example reads in instream data containing semicolons:

data weight;

input PatientID $ Week1 Week8 Week16;

loss=Week1-Week16;

datalines4;

444 Chapter 21 • Reading Raw Data