SAS format char - sas

Question

First i have created this table
data rmlib.tableXML;
input XMLCol1 $ 1-10 XMLCol2 $ 11-20 XMLCol3 $ 21-30 XMLCol4 $ 31-40 XMLCol5 $ 41-50 XMLCol6 $ 51-60;
datalines;
| AAAAA A||AABAAAAA|| BAAAAA|| AAAAAA||AAAAAAA ||AAAA |
;
run;
I want to clean, concatenate and export. I have written the following code
data rmlib.tableXML_LARGO;
file CleanXML lrecl=90000;
set rmlib.tableXML;
array XMLCol{6} ;
array bits{6};
array sqlvars{6};
do i = 1 to 6;
*bits{i}=%largo(XMLCol{i})-2;
%let bits =input(%largo(XMLCol{i})-2,comma16.5);
sqlvars{i} = substr(XMLCol{i},2,&bits.);
put sqlvars{i} &char10.. #;
end;
run;
the macro largo count how many characters i have
%macro largo(num);
length(put(&num.,32500.))
%mend;
What i need is instead of have char10, i would like that this number(10) would be the length, of each string, so to have something like
put sqlvars{i} &char&bits.. #;
I don't know if it possible but i can't do it.
I would like to see something like
AAAAA AAABAAAAA BAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAA
It is important to me to keep the spaces(this is only an example of an extract of a xml extract). In addition I will change (for example) "B" for "XPM", so the size will change after cleaning the text, that it what i need to be flexible in the char
Thank you for your time
Julen

Answer 1

I'm still not quite sure what you want to achieve, but if you want to combine the text from multiple varriables into one variable, then you could do something along the lines:
proc sql;
select name into :names separated by '||'
from dictionary.columns
where 1=1
and upcase(libname)='YOURLIBNAME'
and upcase(memname)='YOURTABLENAME';
quit;
data work.testing;
length resultvar $ 32000;
set YOURLIBNAME.YOURTABLENAME;
resultvar = &names;
resultvar2 = compress(resultvar,'|');
run;
Wasn't able to test this, but this should work if you replace YOURLIBNAME and YOURTABLENAME with your respective tables. I'm not 100% sure if the compress will preserve the spaces in the text.. But I think it should.

Answer 2

The format $VARYING. <length-variable> is a good candidate for solving this output problem.
On the presumption of having a number of variables whose values are vertical-bar bounded and wanting to output to a file the concatenation of the values without the bounding bars.
data have;
file "c:\temp\want.txt" lrecl=9000;
length xmlcol1-xmlcol6 $100;
array values xmlcol1-xmlcol6 ;
xmlcol1 = '| A |';
xmlcol2 = '|A BB|';
xmlcol3 = '|A BB|';
xmlcol4 = '|A BBXC|';
xmlcol5 = '|DD |';
xmlcol6 = '| ZZZ |';
do index = 1 to dim(values);
value = substr(values[index], 2); * ignore presumed opening vertical bar;
value_length = length(value)-1; * length with still presumed closing vertical bar excluded;
put value $varying. value_length #; * send to file the value excluding the presumed closing vertical bar;
end;
run;

Answer 3

You have some coding errors in that is making it difficult to understand what you want to do.
Your %largo() macro doesn't make any sense. There is no format 32500.. The only reason it would run in your code is because you are trying to apply the format to a character variable instead of a number. So SAS will automatically convert to use the $32500. instead.
The %LET statement that you have hidden in the middle of your data step will execute BEFORE the data step runs. So it would be less confusing to move it before the data step.
So replacing the call to %largo() your macro variable BITS will contain this text.
%let bits =input(length(put(XMLCol{i},32500.))-2,comma16.5);
Which you then use inside a line of code. So that line will end up being this SAS code.
sqlvars{i} = substr(XMLCol{i},2,input(length(put(XMLCol{i},$32500.))-2,comma16.5));
Which seems to me to be a really roundabout way to do this:
sqlvars{i} = substr(XMLCol{i},2,length(XMLCol{i})-2);
Since SAS stores character variables as fixed length, it will pad the value stored. So what you need to do is to remember the length so that you can use it later when you write out the value. So perhaps you should just create another array of numeric variables where you can store the lengths.
sqllen{i} = length(XMLCol{i})-2;
sqlvars{i} = substr(XMLCol{i},2,sqllen{i});