If an INFILE statement references an external file that was allocated with a record format that indicates the presence of printer‑control characters (that is, the RECFM value includes an A or M suffix), SAS—by default—treats the carriage‑control character in column 1 as part of the input data. As a result, any INPUT statement that references specific column positions must account for this extra character.

If you want SAS to ignore the carriage‑control character and base column offsets on only the text portion of each record, specify the FILECC system option either at SAS invocation or in an OPTIONS statement. FILECC instructs SAS to exclude the column‑1 carriage‑control character from the input data when reading printer files.