SAS Informats

Informats are used to read in data that does not conform to the default SAS length restrictions. Informats are available for character, numeric, and other data forms. Example:


input name :$15. age income;


Here the informat of the form :$w. (trailing period required) tells SAS to read characters up to the first blank and assign the first w of these characters as the value of the variable. Here the first 15 characters will be assigned to the variable name. The default informat is equivalent to :$8. and w must be between 1 and 200. 公卫人

The informat &$w. reads characters up to the first occurance of 2 successive blanks and assigns the first w of these characters as the value of the variable. This informat is useful values of character variables have single embedded blanks. The width w must be between 1 and 200. 公卫论坛

The informat w. is used to read in numeric data with w digits. This informat is most often used with column input.

The informat date7. reads dates of the form 02MAR93. The informat mmddyy8. reads dates of the form 03-02-93.

There are many other SAS informats available which are useful for processing dates and other specialized situations. See the SAS Language Reference for additional information 公卫论坛