That is easy to deal with: 1. Change all quotation marks to a character not present in your data. 2. Change all pipes to quotation marks. 3. Import through normal DSD rules. 4. Revert the quotation marks.

I wonder if you could do it a bit easier by skipping the input/output and actually changing the character map table (PROC TRANTAB, I believe) to make SAS think | is " and " is ½ or something. Then import, and then revert to the normal translation table...

-Joe

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:07 PM, Dan T Keating <keatingd@washpost.com>wrote:

> A dataset I need to regularly import is comma-delimited and then uses > pipes as the text qualifier rather than quotes (because the data itself is > laden with both quotes and commas). I lobbied for just pipe-delimited but > the providers noted that both MS Access and mysql have for many years made > it very easy to designate the text qualifier as any character when > importing delimited data. The data imports easily into both of them. > > If DSD would recognize pipes rather than quotes, it would work perfectly. > To replicate the funtionality of DSD, I have to program my own version of > scan that ignores commas enclosed within pipes. The bigger and better scan > (9.2) does not include this -- its q operator only envisions quotes as the > text qualifer. > > The SAS solution I think I have to shoot for is regular expression pattern > matching. > > But a good SAS solution would be some flexibility in what DSD uses as its > text qualifier. Am I wrong in concluding that the flexibility is not there > now? > > Thanks. > > Dan > _________________________________ > Dan Keating > Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post > (202) 334-5047, keatingd@washpost.com >