> What I do not understand is how SAS knows where the variables begin and > end. > I managed to break off a little hunk of the beginning of my file and look > at > it in an editor, and it is numbers without any obvious delimiters. Is the > delimiter a particular numeric string? I thought the SAS command file would > contain the starting location for each of the fixed-length fields, but I do > not see anything in the file that could be interpreted that way just a > little wraparound code and then a long list of variable names followed by > triplets of a code, an equals sign, and a text string, terminating with a > semicolon. >
Search around for the word INPUT. If that doesn't exist, you're probably looking at a formatting-only script -- and the delimiting happens elsewhere. Here are some examples of what the R SAScii package looks for when it uses a SAS importation script to read in ASCII data: library(SAScii) ?parse.SAScii note that there are additional examples under ?read.SAScii that include IPUMS data ;) also: David's idea is totally awesome [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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