> What I do not understand is how SAS knows where the variables begin and
> end.
> I managed to break off a little hunk of the beginning of my file and look
> at
> it in an editor, and it is numbers without any obvious delimiters. Is the
> delimiter a particular numeric string? I thought the SAS command file would
> contain the starting location for each of the fixed-length fields, but I do
> not see anything in the file that could be interpreted that way – just a
> little wraparound code and then a long list of variable names followed by
> triplets of a code, an equals sign, and a text string, terminating with a
> semicolon.
>


Search around for the word INPUT.  If that doesn't exist, you're probably
looking at a formatting-only script -- and the delimiting happens elsewhere.

Here are some examples of what the R SAScii package looks for when it uses
a SAS importation script to read in ASCII data:

library(SAScii)
?parse.SAScii

note that there are additional examples under ?read.SAScii that include
IPUMS data  ;)

also: David's idea is totally awesome

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