Hi,

(for brevity, this post is a simplified example of a more complex problem...)

Summary: Is there a way to make SAS accept a *string* of characters as a field delimiter when reading a flat file? From the docs, it looks like NO (rats!) but thought I'd ask.

Details: I have to read in a file with embedded carriage returns in the fields. I note Richard DeVenezia's post on how to do this: http://listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0206D&L=sas-l&P=R33076.

Say this is the sample file:

This is record 1, VAR1

With one embedded carriage return ===== This is record 1, VAR2

With two embedded carriage returns Oops, and a =line= containing a single = character ===== This is record 1, VAR3

With three embedded carriage returns ===== This is record 2, VAR1

With one embedded carriage return ===== ===== This is record 2, VAR3

With three embedded carriage returns =====

What I want is two observations, three vars, embedded CRs in the vars. For obs 2, var2 is missing.

I *wish* I could say:

data foo; infile 'c:\temp\arbitrary.txt' recfm=n dsd dlm='====='; /* or perhaps "\n=====\n" in hex */

length var1-var3 $5000;

input var1-var3;

... any additional processing ... ; run;

but dlm only accepts a single character for the delimiter. Bummer.

Rationale: I'd like the input file to be "human readable". If I change the delimiter to Tab, #, etc, the file is hard to "human" read. If I could specify the exact *string* I want to delimit fields, it would be easier to accomplish this.

(The actual "file" is a PIPE to a Perl script. Another (ugly) option is a command line switch to have two output types: one for SAS import, and the other for STDOUT)

Any bright ideas, O gurus of SAS-L?

Regards, Scott

P.S.: SAS v8.2, Windows