specify the variable or variables you want to read from the current position in the record. Each variable can be followed immediately by an input format specification.

specify an input format. These are of the form or for standard numeric and character informats, respectively, where is the width of the field and is the decimal parameter, if any. You can also use a named SAS format such as BESTw.d. Also, you can use a single $ or & for list input applications. If the width is unspecified, the informat uses list-input rules to determine the length by searching for a blank (or comma) delimiter. The special format $RECORD. is used for reading the rest of the record into one variable. For more information about formats, see SAS Language Reference: Dictionary.

Record holding is always implied for RECFM=N binary files, as if the INPUT statement has a trailing @ sign. For more information, see Chapter 8.

Examples of valid INPUT statements follow:

input x y;
input @1 name $ @20 sex $ @(20+2) age 3.;

eight=8;
input >9 <eight  number2 ib8.;

The following example uses binary input:

file "out2.dat" recfm=n ;
number=499; at=1;
do i = 1 to 5;
   number=number+1;
   put >at number ib8.; at=at+8;
end;
closefile "out2.dat";

infile "out2.dat" recfm=n;
size=8;     /* 8 bytes */
do pos=1 to 33 by size;
   input >pos number ib8.;
   print number;
end;

are used to advance to a new record. Record-directives are the following:

specifies a specific column on the record. The positionals are the following: