Date:         Wed, 9 Aug 2006 20:52:04 -0700
Reply-To:     Steve_Dun <steve.bates003@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Steve_Dun <steve.bates003@GMAIL.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: data readin problem
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
In-Reply-To:  <1155141496.074165.48020@n13g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Could you try compressing out the tabs and reading the file in as fixed
width?

kimberlyhare@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi, any help here would be appreciated.
>
> I have a data set that is tab delimited, but when they were extracting
> it, they aligned all the columns, and messed up the tab delimiting.  In
> theory there are only supposed to be 14 fields, but in practice, if I
> read it in as a tab delimited file, there are 25 fields, and the
> important ones have all been staggered, so a column for dates has
> dates, amounts, and descriptions in it.  Pointers *should* work to read
> in the data in, but when I use pointers, I get those little rectangles
> in my SAS dataset.  The number of rectangles varies on each
> observation.
>
> ANY suggestion would be greatly appreicated.