Thank you very much.
Roy is correct to note that downstream fix would be difficult.
I found that -infile (free format)- works well. I had thought infile was for fixed format or space delimited only.
For example, "infile _skip(10) str5 ICD9code _skip(89) using filename.txt" will forcefully read ICD9code as strings even if it's all numbers.
The drawback is that I had to write a very long command with nearly 100 variables of interest.
The advantage is that infile was able to read in over 1,000,000 observations quickly.
Thanks again,
Alice
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