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SAS informats have the following form:
<$>informat<w>.<d> |
Note: Even though SAS can
read up to 31 decimal places
when you specify some numeric informats, floating-point numbers with more
than 12 decimal places might lose precision due to the limitations of the
eight-byte floating point representation used by most computers.
Informats always contain a period (.) as a part of the name. If you omit the w and the d values from the informat, SAS uses default values. If the data contains decimal points, SAS ignores the d value and reads the number of decimal places that are actually in the input data.
If the informat width is too narrow to read all the columns in the input data, you may get unexpected results. The problem frequently occurs with the date and time informats. You must adjust the width of the informat to include blanks or special characters between the day, month, year, or time. For more information about date and time values, see the discussion on SAS date and time values in Dates, Times, and Intervals .
When a problem occurs with an informat, SAS writes a note to the SAS log and assigns a missing value to the variable. Problems occur if you use an incompatible informat, such as a numeric informat to read character data, or if you specify the width of a date and time informat that causes SAS to read a special character in the last column.
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Copyright 1999 by SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved.