Date:         Tue, 29 Dec 1998 16:30:27 GMT
Reply-To:     DNordlund <dnordlund@AOL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From:         DNordlund <dnordlund@AOL.COM>
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Subject:      Re: Excel and Dates

Bernie Zimmerman wrote:
>
>I've been given a group of files, about 10 files with ~ 200K records in
>each, to process in SAS.  The files come from MS Excel and (almost) always
>consist of a phone number, a blank column, and a character date equivalent.
>Some examples might be:
>
>2012211234       7/11/98
>2123313456           8/18/98
>4156782222       10/5/98 .
>
>I've tried reading these ascii/flat/text files into SAS, but I'm unable to
>treat the "date" column successfully.  Here is the code I used:
>
>filename  flat1 '/workd10/greta/cell8' ;
>
>data  abc ;
>
>  infile  flat1  lrecl= 500  dlm= '09'x ;    /* TAB delimited */
>  input  phone $10.  prov_ch $8. ;
>
>  prov_da= input(prov_ch, mmddyy8.) ;
>
>drop  prov_ch ;
>run ;
>
>proc  print  data= abc(obs= 25);    run ;
>
>
>The value for prov_da for all values is always "missing".
>
>Is there something obvious that I'm overlooking?
>Hope to hear from someone soon.
>
>TIA
>
>
 
Bernie,
 
you might try adding a length statement and changing the input statement as
follows:
 
1. right after the DATA ABC statement add
 
length phone $10 provch $8;
 
 
2. change your input statement to
 
input phone prov_ch;
 
I believe your input statement was reading the first 10 columns into phone, and
then immediately encountered a tab when trying to read prov_ch.  I think you
want to use list input when you have delimited data.  The length statement will
initialize your variables to the length that you want.
 
Hope this helps,
 
Dan Nordlund