topic Will %superq also mask quotes ? in SAS Programming

Will %superq also mask quotes ?

Billybob73 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 06:38:52 GMT

Hi,

I'm reading zipfiles in a looped macro. I'm using this right now. It works.

But can I omit the %bquote to prevent the code from giving error messages on quotes ?

In other words : Does %superq also mask quotes ?

filename targzip ZIP "%bquote(%superq(targdir)/%superq(zname&i))";

Thanks

Re: Will %superq also mask quotes ?

s_lassen — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 08:39:45 GMT

Yes, as it says in the manual:

The %SUPERQ function returns the value of a macro variable without attempting to resolve any macros or macro variable references in the value. %SUPERQ masks the following special characters and mnemonic operators:

& % ' " ( ) + − * / < > = ¬ ^ ~ ; , #  blank
AND OR NOT EQ NE LE LT GE GT IN

Re: Will %superq also mask quotes ?

RW9 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 09:09:56 GMT

Why would you need to do any of that? The only reason I can think of is that your filenames contain special characters such as quotes, which is really bad practice on any system. Following some simple naming convention:

filename tagzip zip "targdir/&name&i.";

Should be sufficient. Also note, you can get rid of the whole macro looping part you have around this code by using a datastep:

data _null_;
  set loop;  /* This is the dataset with all the names of the zips */
  call execute(cats('filename targzip zip "targdir/',name,'";'));
run;

You can put other call executes on there to do further processing too. This is far simpler than lists of values and do loops and all that.