An external file is a file
that is maintained by the machine operating environment or by a software
product other than SAS. A flat file with comma-separated values is
one example. SAS Data Integration Studio provides three source designer
wizards that enable you to create metadata objects for external files:
-
the delimited external file wizard for external files
in which data values are separated with a delimiter character. This
wizard enables you to specify multiple delimiters, nonstandard delimiters,
missing values, and multi-line records.
-
the fixed-width external file wizard for external files
in which data values appear in columns that are a specified number
of characters wide. This wizard enables you to specify non-contiguous
data.
-
the user-written external
file wizard for complex external files that require user-written SAS
code to access their data.
The external file source designer wizards enable
you to do the following:
-
display a raw view of the data
in the external file
-
display a formatted view of the
data in the external file, as specified in the SAS metadata for that
file
-
display the SAS DATA step and SAS
INFILE statement that the wizard generates for the selected file
-
display the SAS log for the code
that is generated by the wizard
-
specify options for the SAS INFILE
statement that is generated by the wizard, such as National Language
Support (NLS) encoding
-
override the generated SAS INFILE
statement with a user-written statement
-
supply a user-written SAS DATA
step to access an external file
The following figure shows establishing
connectivity to external files: