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 inPROC IMPORT
allows the user to set how many rows SAS reads in order to guess theinformat
,format
, andinput
codePROC IMPORT
automatically generates for theinfile
statement.Using
PROC IMPORT
with a dataset induces SAS to guess at buildinginfile
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 hasformat
,informat
, andinput
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...