Changing the Length of Character Value (1)

Reading Free-Format Data

Changing the Length of Character Values

Remember that when you use list input to read raw data, character values are assigned a default length of 8. Let's take a look at what happens when list input is used to read character values that have a value longer than 8.

The raw data file referenced by the fileref Citydata contains 1970 and 1980 population figures for several large U.S. cities. Notice that some city names are rather long.

1---+----10---+----20---+----

ANCHORAGE 48081 174431

ATLANTA 495039 425022

BOSTON 641071 562994

CHARLOTTE 241420 314447

CHICAGO 3369357 3005072

DALLAS 844401 904078

DENVER 514678 492365

DETROIT 1514063 1203339

MIAMI 334859 346865

PHILADELPHIA 1949996 1688210

SACRAMENTO 257105 275741

The longer character values are truncated when they are written to the program data vector.

Program Data Vector

Output for the data set shows the truncated values for City.

     data perm.growth;
        infile citydata;
        input City $ Pop70 Pop80;
     run;
     proc print data=perm.growth;
     run;

Obs	City	Pop70	Pop80
1	ANCHORAG	48081	174431
2	ATLANTA	495039	425022
3	BOSTON	641071	562994
4	CHARLOTT	241420	314447
5	CHICAGO	3369357	3005072
6	DALLAS	844401	904078
7	DENVER	514678	492365
8	DETROIT	1514063	1203339
9	MIAMI	334859	346865
10	PHILADEL	1949996	1688210
11	SACRAMEN	257105	275741

Reading Free-Format Data
Changing the Length of Character Values