Clayton,

Take a look at: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/63026/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000146932.htm

I think it provides everything you need, particularly getting rid of control characters before parsing the input.

Art ------------ On Dec 23, 10:51 am, Clayton <claytonro...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm doing a raw import that looks like this: > > data active; > infile DL(activeraw.csv) firstobs=2 dsd; > input item_ID Custom_Label $ Product_ID_Type > Product_ID_Value........... > > The data is comma delimited. Thing is, one of the fields has a > problematic character. It shows up in excel as one of those mini- > boxes with a question mark in it. I'm going to be reporting with new > data regularly, so deleting the offending bits is a cumbersome > option. > > Here is what one offending piece looks like, copied from notepad: > > previousvalue,"Shipped on 10/29/2010. Tracking number: > OK",nextvalue > > (The bad piece is after "tracking number" and only shows up in excel-- > I don't know what it is. The hard return is in the raw data - Perhaps > that is all this is, a hard return? Because Excel shows the 'error > character' and not the "OK" that is shown above) > > Can I tell sas to just somehow ignore between the double quotes? It > does generate an error in the log, affects the values that come after > it, but does not affect the next observation or stop the execution.