HANDLING SPECIAL EMBEDDED CHARACTERS To manage and report data in DBMS that contains very long text fields is not easy. This can be frustrating if the text field has special embedded symbols such as tabs, carriage returns (‘OD’x ), line feeds (‘OA’x) and page breaks. But here is simple SAS code which takes care of those issues. The normal line end for Windows text files is a  carriage return character or a line feed character so   The syntax for taking out all carriage return ('OD'x) and line feed ('OA'x) characters is comment= Compress(comment,'0D0A'x);                              or comment= TRANWRD(comment,'0D0A'x,’’); If you just want to take out the Carriage Return, use this code: comment= TRANWRD(comment,'0D'x,''); You could also try this one too.. Comment=compress(Comment, ,"kw"); * k is for keep, w is for "write-a...

/* create sample data */ data one; input a $ b $ c $ d e; cards; a . a 1 3 . b . 2 4 a a a . 5 . . b 3 5 a a a . 6 a a a . 7 a a a 2 8 ; run; /* create a format to group missing and non-missing */ proc format; value $missfmt ' '=' missing ' other='non-missing'; value missfmt .=' missing ' other= 'non-missing' ; run; %macro lst(dsn); /** open dataset **/ %let dsid= %sysfunc (open(&dsn)); /** cnt will contain the number of variables in the dataset passed in **/ %let cnt= %sysfunc (attrn(&dsid,nvars)); %do i = 1 %to &cnt; /** create a different macro variable for each variable in dataset **/ %let x&i= %sysfunc (varname(&dsid,&i)); /** list the type of the current variable **/ %let typ&i= %sysfunc (vartype(&dsid,&i)); %end; /** close dataset **/ %let rc= %sysfunc ( close (&dsid)); %do i = 1 %to &cnt; /* loop through each variable in PROC FREQ and ...