topic Re: Macro to Retrieve Current Date in SAS Programming

Macro to Retrieve Current Date

dhrumil_patel — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:41:21 GMT

Hello,

I have the macro below which I believe is correct, but I get the error message shown below. When I googled the error message, some authors said a semicolon was missing, but adding that still resulted in the error.

I am running SAS 9.4 and receive this error on both Base SAS and SAS EG.

Please advise on how to avoid the error.

Thank you.

%macro currdate;
%qtrim(%qleft(%qsysfunc(date(),worddate18.)));
%mend currdate;

Re: Macro to Retrieve Current Date

ChrisBrooks — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:57:38 GMT

The macro processor is a code generator so the line of code you are executing returns a date which SAS then tries to execute and which is, of course, invalid.

If you want a macro to return today's date like a function then you could do this

%macro currdate;
%let thisday=%qtrim(%qleft(%qsysfunc(date(),worddate18.)));
&thisday
%mend currdate;

%let myday=%currdate;
%put &myday;

Of course there's no need to do that since you can simply use the date function outside a macro anyway....

Re: Macro to Retrieve Current Date

ChrisNZ — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 01:07:38 GMT

Your code works as intended and the macro call returns a string.

You must use that string somehow, for example:

%let d = %currdate;

Re: Macro to Retrieve Current Date

dhrumil_patel — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 01:09:23 GMT

Thanks Chris.