pandas read_csv with multiple separators does not work - pandas

I need to be able to parse 2 different types of CSVs with read_csv, the first has ;-separated values and the second has ,-separated values. I need to do this at the same time.
That is, the CSV can have this format:
some;csv;values;here
or this:
some,csv,values,here
or even mixed:
some;csv,values;here
I tried many things like the following regex but nothing worked:
data = pd.read_csv(csv_file, sep=r'[,;]', engine='python')
Am I doing something wrong with the regex?

Instead of reading from a file, I ran your code sample
reading from a string:
txt = '''C1;C2,C3;C4
some;csv,values;here
some1;csv1,values1;here1'''
data = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(txt), sep='[,;]', engine='python')
and got a proper result:
C1 C2 C3 C4
0 some csv values here
1 some1 csv1 values1 here1
Note that the sep parameter can be even an ordinary (not raw) string,
because it does not contain any backslashes.
So your idea to specify multiple separators as a regex pattern is OK.
The reason that your code failed is probably an "inconsistent" division of
lines into fileds. Maybe you should ensure that each line contains the
same number of commas and semi-colons (at least not too many).
Look thoroughly at your stack trace. There should include some information
about which line of the source file caused the problem.
Then look at the indicated line and correct it.
Edit
To look what happens in a "failure case", I changed the source string to:
txt = '''C1;C2,C3;C4
some;csv,values;here
some1;csv1,values1;here1
some2;csv2,values2;here2,xxxx'''
i.e. I added one line with 5 fields (one too many).
Then execution of the above code results in an error message:
ParserError: Expected 4 fields in line 4, saw 5. ...
Note words in line 4, precisely indicating the offending input line
(line numbers starts from 1).

Related

pandas.errors.ParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 7 fields in line 3, saw 11 [duplicate]

I'm trying to use pandas to manipulate a .csv file but I get this error:
pandas.parser.CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 2 fields in line 3, saw 12
I have tried to read the pandas docs, but found nothing.
My code is simple:
path = 'GOOG Key Ratios.csv'
#print(open(path).read())
data = pd.read_csv(path)
How can I resolve this? Should I use the csv module or another language ?
File is from Morningstar
you could also try;
data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv', on_bad_lines='skip')
Do note that this will cause the offending lines to be skipped.
Edit
For Pandas < 1.3.0 try
data = pd.read_csv("file1.csv", error_bad_lines=False)
as per pandas API reference.
It might be an issue with
the delimiters in your data
the first row, as #TomAugspurger noted
To solve it, try specifying the sep and/or header arguments when calling read_csv. For instance,
df = pandas.read_csv(filepath, sep='delimiter', header=None)
In the code above, sep defines your delimiter and header=None tells pandas that your source data has no row for headers / column titles. Thus saith the docs: "If file contains no header row, then you should explicitly pass header=None". In this instance, pandas automatically creates whole-number indices for each field {0,1,2,...}.
According to the docs, the delimiter thing should not be an issue. The docs say that "if sep is None [not specified], will try to automatically determine this." I however have not had good luck with this, including instances with obvious delimiters.
Another solution may be to try auto detect the delimiter
# use the first 2 lines of the file to detect separator
temp_lines = csv_file.readline() + '\n' + csv_file.readline()
dialect = csv.Sniffer().sniff(temp_lines, delimiters=';,')
# remember to go back to the start of the file for the next time it's read
csv_file.seek(0)
df = pd.read_csv(csv_file, sep=dialect.delimiter)
The parser is getting confused by the header of the file. It reads the first row and infers the number of columns from that row. But the first two rows aren't representative of the actual data in the file.
Try it with data = pd.read_csv(path, skiprows=2)
This is definitely an issue of delimiter, as most of the csv CSV are got create using sep='/t' so try to read_csv using the tab character (\t) using separator /t. so, try to open using following code line.
data=pd.read_csv("File_path", sep='\t')
I had this problem, where I was trying to read in a CSV without passing in column names.
df = pd.read_csv(filename, header=None)
I specified the column names in a list beforehand and then pass them into names, and it solved it immediately. If you don't have set column names, you could just create as many placeholder names as the maximum number of columns that might be in your data.
col_names = ["col1", "col2", "col3", ...]
df = pd.read_csv(filename, names=col_names)
Your CSV file might have variable number of columns and read_csv inferred the number of columns from the first few rows. Two ways to solve it in this case:
1) Change the CSV file to have a dummy first line with max number of columns (and specify header=[0])
2) Or use names = list(range(0,N)) where N is the max number of columns.
I had this problem as well but perhaps for a different reason. I had some trailing commas in my CSV that were adding an additional column that pandas was attempting to read. Using the following works but it simply ignores the bad lines:
data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv', error_bad_lines=False)
If you want to keep the lines an ugly kind of hack for handling the errors is to do something like the following:
line = []
expected = []
saw = []
cont = True
while cont == True:
try:
data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv',skiprows=line)
cont = False
except Exception as e:
errortype = e.message.split('.')[0].strip()
if errortype == 'Error tokenizing data':
cerror = e.message.split(':')[1].strip().replace(',','')
nums = [n for n in cerror.split(' ') if str.isdigit(n)]
expected.append(int(nums[0]))
saw.append(int(nums[2]))
line.append(int(nums[1])-1)
else:
cerror = 'Unknown'
print 'Unknown Error - 222'
if line != []:
# Handle the errors however you want
I proceeded to write a script to reinsert the lines into the DataFrame since the bad lines will be given by the variable 'line' in the above code. This can all be avoided by simply using the csv reader. Hopefully the pandas developers can make it easier to deal with this situation in the future.
The following worked for me (I posted this answer, because I specifically had this problem in a Google Colaboratory Notebook):
df = pd.read_csv("/path/foo.csv", delimiter=';', skiprows=0, low_memory=False)
You can try;
data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv', sep='\t')
I came across the same issue. Using pd.read_table() on the same source file seemed to work. I could not trace the reason for this but it was a useful workaround for my case. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can shed more light on why it worked.
Edit:
I found that this error creeps up when you have some text in your file that does not have the same format as the actual data. This is usually header or footer information (greater than one line, so skip_header doesn't work) which will not be separated by the same number of commas as your actual data (when using read_csv). Using read_table uses a tab as the delimiter which could circumvent the users current error but introduce others.
I usually get around this by reading the extra data into a file then use the read_csv() method.
The exact solution might differ depending on your actual file, but this approach has worked for me in several cases
I've had this problem a few times myself. Almost every time, the reason is that the file I was attempting to open was not a properly saved CSV to begin with. And by "properly", I mean each row had the same number of separators or columns.
Typically it happened because I had opened the CSV in Excel then improperly saved it. Even though the file extension was still .csv, the pure CSV format had been altered.
Any file saved with pandas to_csv will be properly formatted and shouldn't have that issue. But if you open it with another program, it may change the structure.
Hope that helps.
I've had a similar problem while trying to read a tab-delimited table with spaces, commas and quotes:
1115794 4218 "k__Bacteria", "p__Firmicutes", "c__Bacilli", "o__Bacillales", "f__Bacillaceae", ""
1144102 3180 "k__Bacteria", "p__Firmicutes", "c__Bacilli", "o__Bacillales", "f__Bacillaceae", "g__Bacillus", ""
368444 2328 "k__Bacteria", "p__Bacteroidetes", "c__Bacteroidia", "o__Bacteroidales", "f__Bacteroidaceae", "g__Bacteroides", ""
import pandas as pd
# Same error for read_table
counts = pd.read_csv(path_counts, sep='\t', index_col=2, header=None, engine = 'c')
pandas.io.common.CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: out of memory
This says it has something to do with C parsing engine (which is the default one). Maybe changing to a python one will change anything
counts = pd.read_table(path_counts, sep='\t', index_col=2, header=None, engine='python')
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Now that is a different error.
If we go ahead and try to remove spaces from the table, the error from python-engine changes once again:
1115794 4218 "k__Bacteria","p__Firmicutes","c__Bacilli","o__Bacillales","f__Bacillaceae",""
1144102 3180 "k__Bacteria","p__Firmicutes","c__Bacilli","o__Bacillales","f__Bacillaceae","g__Bacillus",""
368444 2328 "k__Bacteria","p__Bacteroidetes","c__Bacteroidia","o__Bacteroidales","f__Bacteroidaceae","g__Bacteroides",""
_csv.Error: ' ' expected after '"'
And it gets clear that pandas was having problems parsing our rows. To parse a table with python engine I needed to remove all spaces and quotes from the table beforehand. Meanwhile C-engine kept crashing even with commas in rows.
To avoid creating a new file with replacements I did this, as my tables are small:
from io import StringIO
with open(path_counts) as f:
input = StringIO(f.read().replace('", ""', '').replace('"', '').replace(', ', ',').replace('\0',''))
counts = pd.read_table(input, sep='\t', index_col=2, header=None, engine='python')
tl;dr
Change parsing engine, try to avoid any non-delimiting quotes/commas/spaces in your data.
Use delimiter in parameter
pd.read_csv(filename, delimiter=",", encoding='utf-8')
It will read.
The dataset that I used had a lot of quote marks (") used extraneous of the formatting. I was able to fix the error by including this parameter for read_csv():
quoting=3 # 3 correlates to csv.QUOTE_NONE for pandas
As far as I can tell, and after taking a look at your file, the problem is that the csv file you're trying to load has multiple tables. There are empty lines, or lines that contain table titles. Try to have a look at this Stackoverflow answer. It shows how to achieve that programmatically.
Another dynamic approach to do that would be to use the csv module, read every single row at a time and make sanity checks/regular expressions, to infer if the row is (title/header/values/blank). You have one more advantage with this approach, that you can split/append/collect your data in python objects as desired.
The easiest of all would be to use pandas function pd.read_clipboard() after manually selecting and copying the table to the clipboard, in case you can open the csv in excel or something.
Irrelevant:
Additionally, irrelevant to your problem, but because no one made mention of this: I had this same issue when loading some datasets such as seeds_dataset.txt from UCI. In my case, the error was occurring because some separators had more whitespaces than a true tab \t. See line 3 in the following for instance
14.38 14.21 0.8951 5.386 3.312 2.462 4.956 1
14.69 14.49 0.8799 5.563 3.259 3.586 5.219 1
14.11 14.1 0.8911 5.42 3.302 2.7 5 1
Therefore, use \t+ in the separator pattern instead of \t.
data = pd.read_csv(path, sep='\t+`, header=None)
Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 2 fields in line 3, saw 12
The error gives a clue to solve the problem " Expected 2 fields in line 3, saw 12", saw 12 means length of the second row is 12 and first row is 2.
When you have data like the one shown below, if you skip rows then most of the data will be skipped
data = """1,2,3
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4,5
1,2
1,2,3,4"""
If you dont want to skip any rows do the following
#First lets find the maximum column for all the rows
with open("file_name.csv", 'r') as temp_f:
# get No of columns in each line
col_count = [ len(l.split(",")) for l in temp_f.readlines() ]
### Generate column names (names will be 0, 1, 2, ..., maximum columns - 1)
column_names = [i for i in range(max(col_count))]
import pandas as pd
# inside range set the maximum value you can see in "Expected 4 fields in line 2, saw 8"
# here will be 8
data = pd.read_csv("file_name.csv",header = None,names=column_names )
Use range instead of manually setting names as it will be cumbersome when you have many columns.
Additionally you can fill up the NaN values with 0, if you need to use even data length. Eg. for clustering (k-means)
new_data = data.fillna(0)
For those who are having similar issue with Python 3 on linux OS.
pandas.errors.ParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Calling
read(nbytes) on source failed. Try engine='python'.
Try:
df.read_csv('file.csv', encoding='utf8', engine='python')
In my case the separator was not the default "," but Tab.
pd.read_csv(file_name.csv, sep='\\t',lineterminator='\\r', engine='python', header='infer')
Note: "\t" did not work as suggested by some sources. "\\t" was required.
I believe the solutions,
,engine='python'
, error_bad_lines = False
will be good if it is dummy columns and you want to delete it.
In my case, the second row really had more columns and I wanted those columns to be integrated and to have the number of columns = MAX(columns).
Please refer to the solution below that I could not read anywhere:
try:
df_data = pd.read_csv(PATH, header = bl_header, sep = str_sep)
except pd.errors.ParserError as err:
str_find = 'saw '
int_position = int(str(err).find(str_find)) + len(str_find)
str_nbCol = str(err)[int_position:]
l_col = range(int(str_nbCol))
df_data = pd.read_csv(PATH, header = bl_header, sep = str_sep, names = l_col)
Although not the case for this question, this error may also appear with compressed data. Explicitly setting the value for kwarg compression resolved my problem.
result = pandas.read_csv(data_source, compression='gzip')
Simple resolution: Open the csv file in excel & save it with different name file of csv format. Again try importing it spyder, Your problem will be resolved!
The issue is with the delimiter. Find what kind of delimiter is used in your data and specify it like below:
data = pd.read_csv('some_data.csv', sep='\t')
I came across multiple solutions for this issue. Lot's of folks have given the best explanation for the answers also. But for the beginners I think below two methods will be enough :
import pandas as pd
#Method 1
data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv', error_bad_lines=False)
#Note that this will cause the offending lines to be skipped.
#Method 2 using sep
data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv', sep='\t')
Sometimes the problem is not how to use python, but with the raw data.
I got this error message
Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 18 fields in line 72, saw 19.
It turned out that in the column description there were sometimes commas. This means that the CSV file needs to be cleaned up or another separator used.
An alternative that I have found to be useful in dealing with similar parsing errors uses the CSV module to re-route data into a pandas df. For example:
import csv
import pandas as pd
path = 'C:/FileLocation/'
file = 'filename.csv'
f = open(path+file,'rt')
reader = csv.reader(f)
#once contents are available, I then put them in a list
csv_list = []
for l in reader:
csv_list.append(l)
f.close()
#now pandas has no problem getting into a df
df = pd.DataFrame(csv_list)
I find the CSV module to be a bit more robust to poorly formatted comma separated files and so have had success with this route to address issues like these.
following sequence of commands works (I lose the first line of the data -no header=None present-, but at least it loads):
df = pd.read_csv(filename,
usecols=range(0, 42))
df.columns = ['YR', 'MO', 'DAY', 'HR', 'MIN', 'SEC', 'HUND',
'ERROR', 'RECTYPE', 'LANE', 'SPEED', 'CLASS',
'LENGTH', 'GVW', 'ESAL', 'W1', 'S1', 'W2', 'S2',
'W3', 'S3', 'W4', 'S4', 'W5', 'S5', 'W6', 'S6',
'W7', 'S7', 'W8', 'S8', 'W9', 'S9', 'W10', 'S10',
'W11', 'S11', 'W12', 'S12', 'W13', 'S13', 'W14']
Following does NOT work:
df = pd.read_csv(filename,
names=['YR', 'MO', 'DAY', 'HR', 'MIN', 'SEC', 'HUND',
'ERROR', 'RECTYPE', 'LANE', 'SPEED', 'CLASS',
'LENGTH', 'GVW', 'ESAL', 'W1', 'S1', 'W2', 'S2',
'W3', 'S3', 'W4', 'S4', 'W5', 'S5', 'W6', 'S6',
'W7', 'S7', 'W8', 'S8', 'W9', 'S9', 'W10', 'S10',
'W11', 'S11', 'W12', 'S12', 'W13', 'S13', 'W14'],
usecols=range(0, 42))
CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 53 fields in line 1605634, saw 54
Following does NOT work:
df = pd.read_csv(filename,
header=None)
CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 53 fields in line 1605634, saw 54
Hence, in your problem you have to pass usecols=range(0, 2)
use
pandas.read_csv('CSVFILENAME',header=None,sep=', ')
when trying to read csv data from the link
http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/adult/adult.data
I copied the data from the site into my csvfile. It had extra spaces so used sep =', ' and it worked :)
I had a similar case as this and setting
train = pd.read_csv('input.csv' , encoding='latin1',engine='python')
worked
Check if you are loading the csv with the correct separator.
df = pd.read_csv(csvname, header=0, sep=",")
I had a dataset with prexisting row numbers, I used index_col:
pd.read_csv('train.csv', index_col=0)

How to read elements from a line in VHDL?

I'm trying to use VHDL to read from a file that can have different formats. I know you're supposed to use the following two lines of code to read a line at a time, the read individual elements in that line.
readline(file, aline);
read(aline, element);
However my question is what will read(aline, element) return into element? What will it return if the line is empty? What will it return if I've used it let's say 5 times and my line only has 4 characters?
The reason I want to know is that if I am reading a file with an arbitrary number of spaces between valid data, how do I parse this valid data?
The file contains ASCII characters separated by arbitrary amounts of white space (any number of spaces, tabs, or new lines). If the line starts with a # that line is a comment and should be ignored.
Outside of these comments, the first part of the file contains characters that are only letters or numbers in combinations of variable size. In other words this:
123 ABC 12ABB3
However, the majority of the file (after a certain number of read words) will be purely numbers of arbitrary length, separated by an arbitrary amount of white space. In other words, the second part of the file is this:
255 0 2245 625 430
2222 33 111111
and I must be able to parse these numbers (and interpret them as such) individually.
As mentioned in the comments, all the read procedures in std.textio and ieee.std_logic_textio skip over leading spaces apart from the character and string versions (because a space is as much a character as any other).
You can test whether a line variable (the buffer) is empty like this:
if L'length > 0 then
where L is your line variable. There is also a set of overloaded read procedures with an extra status output:
procedure read (L : inout LINE;
VALUE: out <type> ;
GOOD : out BOOLEAN);
The extra output - GOOD - is true if the read was successful and false if it wasn't. The advantage of these if that the read is unsuccessful, the simulation does not stop (as it does with the regular procedures). Also, with the versions in std.textio, if the read is unsuccessful, the read is non-destructive (ie whatever you were trying to read remains in the buffer). This is not the case with the versions in ieee.std_logic_textio, however.
If you really do not know what format you are trying to read, you could read the entire line into a string, like this:
variable S : string(1 to <some big number>);
...
readline(F, L);
assert L'length < S'length; -- make sure S is big enough
S := (others => ' '); -- make sure that the previous line is overwritten
if L'length > 0 then
read(L, S(1 to L'length);
end if;
The line L is now in the string S. You can then write some code to parse it. You may find the type attribute 'value useful. This converts a string to some type, eg
variable I : integer;
...
I := integer'value(S(12 to 14));
would set integer I to the value contained in elements 12 to 14 of string S.
Another approach, as suggested by user1155120 below, is to peek at the values in the buffer, eg
if L'length > 0 then -- check that the L isn't empty, otherwise the next line blows up
if L.all(1) = '#' then
-- the first character of the line is a '#' so the line must be a comment

How to control genfromtxt to read rows specified?

genfromtxt can skip header and footer lines and speicfy which columns to use.
But how can I control how many lines to read?
Sometimes a txt file might contain several blocks with different shape.
For example,
a=StringIO('''
1,2,3
1,2,3
2,3
2,3
''')
genfromtxt(a,delimiter=',',skip_header=1)
This will raise an error,
ValueError: Some errors were detected !
Line #4 (got 2 columns instead of 3)
Line #5 (got 2 columns instead of 3)
Of couse, I can do it like this:
a=StringIO('''
1,2,3
1,2,3
2,3
2,3
''')
genfromtxt(a,delimiter=',',skip_header=1,skip_footer=2)
It's ugly as I have to calculate the number of rows under the block.
However I wish something like
genfromtxt(a,delimiter=',',skip_header=1,nrows=2)
that would be more clear.
Anyone have a good idea about that? Or use other function?
Update 2015 Oct
This question has been solved in new version of Numpy.
genfromtxt now have a new keywords named max_rows which allow one to control the number of lines to read, cf here.
You can use the invalid_raise = False to skip reading the lines that are missing some data.
E.g.
b = np.genfromtxt(a, delimiter=',', invalid_raise=False)
This will give you a warning, but will not raise an exception.

Fortran runtime error: Bad integer for item 0 in list input?

How do I fix the Fortran runtime error: Bad integer for item 0 in list input?
Below is the Fortran program which generates a runtime error.
CHARACTER CNFILE*(*)
REAL BOX
INTEGER CNUNIT
PARAMETER ( CNUNIT = 10 )
INTEGER NN
OPEN ( UNIT = CNUNIT, FILE = CNFILE, STATUS = 'OLD' )
READ ( CNUNIT,* ) NN, BOX
The error message received from gdb is :
At line 688 of file MCNPT.f (unit = 10, file = 'LATTICE-256.txt')
Fortran runtime error: Bad integer for item 0 in list input
[Inferior 1 (process 3052) exited with code 02]
(gdb)
I am not sure what options must be specified for READ() to read to numbers from the text file. Does it matter if the two numbers on the same line are specified as either an integer or a real in the text file?
Below is the gdb execution of the program using a break point at the open call
Breakpoint 1, readcn (
cnfile=<error reading variable: Cannot access memory at address 0x7fffffffdff0>,
box=-3.37898272e+33, _cnfile=30) at MCNPT.f:686
Since you did not specify form="unformatted" on the open statement, the unit / file is opened for formatted IO. This is appropriate for a human-readable text file. ("unformatted" would be used for a non-human readable file in computer-native format, sometimes called "binary".) Therefore you should provide a format on the read, or use list-directed read, i.e., read(unit, *). To advise on a particular format we would have to know the layout of the numbers in the file. A possible read with format is: read (CNUINT, '(I4, 2X, F6.2)' ) NN, BOX
P.S. I'm answering the question in your question and not the title, which seems unrelated.
EDIT: now that you are show the text data file, a list-directed read looks easier. That is because the data doesn't line up in columns. It seems that the file has two integers on the first line, then three real numbers on each of the following lines. Most likely you need a different read for the first line. Is the code sample that you are showing us trying to read the first line, or one of the later lines? If the first line, it would seem plausible to read into two integer variables. If a later line, into two or three real variables. Two if you wish to skip the third data item on the line.
EDIT 2: the question has been substantially altered several times, which is very confusing. The first line of the text file that was shown in one version of the question contained integers, with later lines having reals. Since the listed-directed read is reading into an integer and a floating variable, it will have problems if you attempt to use it on the later lines that have two real values.

'Bad repeat count' while inputting a file, FORTRAN

I am trying to read a file into my code.
there are 2 subroutines, one which writes a file and the other which reads it.
the writing part was:
write(*,*)'entered refile, shall make file'
ileunitA=int(presentstep)
write(fname,1012)ileunitA
1012 format('DATA_',i6.6,'.dat')
write(fnam,1112)index
1112 format('pp',i3.3)
open(UNIT=ileunitA,FILE=fname)
!variables from module global
write(ileunita,*)u,v,w,pc,p,p0,rho1,gam,con
write(ileunita,*)aip,aim,ajp,ajm,akp,akm,ap,ap0
write(ileunita,*) scon,smomu,smomv,smomw
...
The reading part was as follows(in another subroutine):
ileunita=25;
open(unit=ILEUNITA,file='DATA_010500.dat')
!variables from module global
read(ileunita,*)u,v,w,pc,p,p0,rho1,gam,con
read(ileunita,*)aip,aim,ajp,ajm,akp,akm,ap,ap0
read(ileunita,*) scon,smomu,smomv,smomw
...
When I run the code, it shows the following error:
At line 3682 of file bub2.f90 (unit = 25, file = 'DATA_000001.dat')
Fortran runtime error: Bad repeat count in item 1 of list input
Can anyone help me figure out what could be the problem? And what is 'repeat count'. What is a 'bad' repeat count? Thanks
Guessing a little (you could show the text in the problematic line in your question...), but you are using list directed input (and output) with the * as the second specifier in the read (and write) statements. List directed input allows multiple fields that have the same value to be represented using the syntax r*c, where r is a numeric repeat count and c is the value to be repeated.
If any of your output items generate a field that contains a * then that could be confusing the processing of input.
(It is permissible (though rare) for a processor to represent multiple output fields that have the same value using a repeat count, for example WRITE (unit,*) 23, 23, 23, 23 could result in an input file that contains the text 4*23.)
List directed input also has some other features, such as the handling of delimiter characters, the / character causing input processing to terminate and the possibility and handling of null values. Some of these features may surprise those not familiar with the rules (which are inspired by typical short cuts taken when input was submitted via punched cards), which why it is often better to avoid list directed input and output and use an explicit format instead.
If any of your data fields are of type character you should consider using a non-default DELIM mode to avoid any special characters within the character variable value from confusing the input processing.