Variables are either numeric or character. Type a dollar sign (
$) following each
character variable. Separate names by an
empty space or use ranges of variables with a hyphen. For example, specify
to import the first column as character ID, the second column as character
Sex, the third column as numeric
Age, and the following 100,000 columns as
SNP1 to
SNP100000 with character type. Note that to classify all the SNP columns in a range as character, you must enclose both the range specification and the
$ in parentheses as shown. However, you can often obtain better performance by not using parentheses and instead specifying a common length for the range of character variables in the next parameter (
List of Variable Names and Lengths). For example, specify
for the next parameter (List of Variable Names and Lengths) to set a length of 10 for
ID, 1 for
Sex, 3 for
Age, and 2 for all variables
SNP1 to
SNP500000.
Specifying this parameter and the following parameter (List of Variable Names and Length) for ranges of character variables can significantly reduce import time. The default length of character string is 8. Please define those variables with length larger than 8, or they will be truncated.
Leave this field empty for the system to automatically detect the variable names and types.