DLM and DSD options in infile statement and & usage

The DLM= option enables you to list read data with delimiters rather than the default space. i.e., if your data are separated by ";", you can use DLM=';' to read them correctly.

The DSD (Delimiter-Sensitive Data) in infile statement does three things for you. 1: it ignores delimiters in data values enclosed in quotation marks; 2: it ignores quotation marks as part of your data; 3: it treats two consecutive delimiters in a row as missing value.

eg1: we want to read this data set named testdata.txt in c:\sasdata.

10034 "apples, grapes kiwi" 123456

92626 "oranges" 97654

25414 "pears apple" 987654

data test;

      infile 'c:\sasdata\testdata.txt' dlm=' ' dsd;

      length name $22;

      input zip name $ pounds;

run;

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& usage in SAS

& stops reading character variables until it encounters two or more spaces. So a single space to differentiate the character variable and the adjacent variable will be ignored and the two variables will be treated as one variable.

eg2:

data web;

input age site & $41. hits;

datalines;

12  http://www.site1.org/default.htm   123456

30  http://www.site2.com/index.htm   97654

54  http://www.site3.edu/department/index.htm    987654

;

data two;

input name & 20. age;

cards;

james band   25

barak obama   26

jintao hu   25

;