Chapter 2

The XPT format is a SAS format used for reducing the size of *.SAS7bdat datasets so they can be transported and extracted into another SAS system.

The GUESSINGROWS option in PROC IMPORT allows the user to set how many rows SAS reads in order to guess the informat, format, and input code PROC IMPORT automatically generates for the infile statement.

Using PROC IMPORT with a dataset induces SAS to guess at building infile code. SAS automatically builds this code, then outputs to the log file. Even if this code has errors, much of the generated code is helpful to the programmer because it already has format, informat, and input lines for each variable in the source dataset. The programmer can copy this generated code from the log file into a code file and edit out the errors.

Because fixed-width files do not have delimiters, and the analyst must include in SAS infile code the positions for each character of each variable in each row (or record). Without documentation...