Working with other file formats

Up to now, in this chapter, we have talked about reading in SAS datasets in either XPT or *.SAS7bdat format. Now, we will examine reading in data from non-SAS formats:

• We will start by revisiting the infile statement, and examine options that can be set to help read in non-SAS data.

• Next, we will practice using the infile statement to read a *.csv file and a *.txt file into SAS.

• After this, we will examine PROC IMPORT, and experiment with how it can help us read in data without having us type a lengthy infile statement.

• Finally, we will discuss converting non-SAS data to SAS format for physical storage.

This section will provide an overview of approaches the analyst can take when reading data from non-SAS formats into SAS, and provide several examples.

Reading non-SAS data formats

With respect to the size of data files, you may have noticed that of the three formats for the Chap2_1_SAS, Chap2_1_XPT, and Chap2_1_CSV datasets...