SAS: Specify newline character when input a text file - sas

Question

I'm quite new to SAS and have a very simple problem. I have a text file which is saved like this:
123,123,345,457,4.55~123,123,345,457,4.55~123,123,345,457,4.55
So all the data is written in a single line. The ~ character denotes the newline character. My final goal is to load the text file into sas and create a SAS dataset which should look like this:
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
123 123 345 457 4.55
123 123 345 457 4.55
123 123 345 457 4.55
So ',' is the delimiter and '~' is the new line character.
How can I achieve this?
Thank you very much for your response.
Kind Regards
Consti

Answer 1

Just tell SAS to use both characters as delimiters and add ## to the input statement to prevent it from going to a new line.
data want ;
infile cards dsd dlm=',~';
input v1-v5 ## ;
cards;
123,123,345,457,4.55~123,123,345,457,4.55~123,123,345,457,4.55
;;;;
Result
Obs v1 v2 v3 v4 v5
1 123 123 345 457 4.55
2 123 123 345 457 4.55
3 123 123 345 457 4.55
If you are reading from a file then you might also be able to use the RECFM=N option on the INFILE statement instead of the ## on the INPUT statement, although if the one line actually has LF or CR/LF at the end then you might want to include them in the delimiter list also.

Answer 2

Tom's answer is correct for files that are regular and you don't have issues with inconsistent rows.
If you do need to do exactly what you say though, it's possible; you'd convert ~ to a newline through a pre-processing step. Here's one way to do that.
First, in a data step go through the file with dlm of ~; input the fields until you run to the end of the line, and for each field, output it to a temp file (so now the line has just one data row on it).
Now you have a temp file you can read in like normal, with no ~ characters in it.
You could do this in a number of other ways, literally find/replace ~ with '0D0A'x or whatever your preferred EOL charater is for example (easier/faster to do in another language probably, if you have this in unix and have access to perl for example or even using awk/etc. you could do this probably more easily than in SAS).
filename test_in "c:\temp\test_dlm.txt";
filename test_t temp;
data _null_;
infile test_in dlm='~';
file test_t;
length test_field $32767;
do _n_= 1 by 1 until (_n_ > countc(_infile_,'~'));
input
test_field :$32767. ##;
putlog test_field;
put test_field $;
end;
stop;
run;
data want;
infile test_t dlm=',';
input v1 v2 v3 v4 v5;
run;