Exporting ASCII Text

On occasion you will need to export your SAS data as ASCII text. You may find that the recipient of your data requires that you send some form of delimited ASCII text, because that is all their software can read. In fact, delimited ASCII text is a primitive data exchange format that almost any software can read. 

PROC EXPORT provides a quick way to create ASCII text files from SAS data sets. You can call PROC EXPORT by typing in the SAS code, or you can use the convenient SAS windowing environment Export Wizard that builds the PROC EXPORT code for you. Let s start by looking at using the SAS 9.1 windowing environment Export Wizard... 

You can see how the (pipe) character is entered as the delimiter in the Options dialog box. If you have more complex requirements for the ASCII text file you want to export, you can invoke External File Interface in the Select Export Type window, write customized DATA step code with FILE and PUT statements, or use some of the ODS tagsets supplied by SAS, found at http //support.sas.com/md/base/topics/odsmarkup/, that have the ability to create numerous types of ASCII text formats. 

You may find that you need to export your SAS data as something other than regular ASCII text or Microsoft Office files. In this case, the export wizards in the SAS windowing environment in SAS 9 and SAS Enterprise Guide 3.0 can easily export the following file formats ... 

Process data and export as an ASCII text file... 

A commercial spreadsheet is well suited to editing CD data files. Most CD data analysis software permits a data file to be exported as text. The text file can then be imported into the spreadsheet, easily formatted for CDsstr input and saved as undeliniited ASCII text. Delete, rather than cut, data cells to remove unwanted text/data. 

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