SAS: Capture a Specific Field in Text File - sas

Question

I'm writing a SAS program to interact with an API. I'm trying to use SAS to capture a specific field from a text file generated by the API.
The generated text "resp" looks like this:
{"result":{"progressId":"ab12","percentComplete":0.0,"status":"inProgress"},"meta":{"requestId":"abcde123","httpStatus":"200 - OK"}}
The field I want to capture is "progressID". In this case, it would be "ab12". If the length of progressID will change, what's the easiest way to capture this field?
My current approach is as follows:
/* The following section will import the text into a SAS table,
seperated by colon. The third column would be "ab12","percentCompelte"
*/
proc import out = resp_table
datafile= resp
dbms = dlm REPLACE;
delimiter = ':';
GETNAMES = NO;
run;
/* The following section will trim off the string ,"percentCompete"*/
data resp_table;
set resp_table;
Progress_ID = SUBSTR(VAR3,2,LENGTH(VAR3)-20);
run;
Do you have an easier/ more concise solution?
Thanks!
Shawn

Answer 1

You can use the JSON library engine to read a json document, and copy the contents to SAS datasets. Work with the data items that the engine creates.
Example:
filename myjson "c:\temp\sandbox.json";
data _null_;
file myjson;
input;
put _infile_;
datalines;
{"result":{"progressId":"ab12","percentComplete":0.0,"status":"inProgress"},"meta":{"requestId":"abcde123","httpStatus":"200 - OK"}}
run;
libname jsondoc json "c:\temp\sandbox.json";
proc copy in=jsondoc out=work;
run;
proc print data=work.Alldata;
where P1='result' and P2='progressId';
run;