Use of : when reading multiple records in SAS

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I am studying SAS programming and there is one thing that is puzzling me. I tried to look up what colons (:) do in the text book I am using but I could not find anything.

The following program was one of the questions, and with the colon the program does read the instream data but without the colons it reads funny.

I am suspecting that the length of ABRAMS is less than 12 and that is why it reads it inappropriately, but with the colon for some reason it recognizes is fine.

I appreciate your help.

data a;
 input #1 Lname $ Fname $ /
 Department : $12. Salary : comma.10;
cards;
ABRAMS THOMAS
SALES $25,209.03
;
run;

proc print;
run;
sas
1 Answers

Have a look at the documentation for the input statement. There is admittedly quite a lot of it, so here's a link to the specific page that deals with this:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000144370.htm

Relevant quote:

:

enables you to specify an informat that the INPUT statement uses to read the variable value. For a character variable, this format modifier reads the value from the next non-blank column until the pointer reaches the next blank column, the defined length of the variable, or the end of the data line, whichever comes first. For a numeric variable, this format modifier reads the value from the next non-blank column until the pointer reaches the next blank column or the end of the data line, whichever comes first.

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