topic Re: %QUOTE in SAS Programming

%QUOTE

pchappus — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 14:40:03 GMT

Can somebody much smarter than me help me understand what %QUOTE does? The online documentation says it "masks" a string. Does that mean it ignores things like a quoted string?

Here is the line of code I'm trying to understand.

%IF &strInToLine NE %QUOTE(NONE) %THEN %DO;

I've seen examples where the %QUOTE is used around the macro variable but not around a text like NONE.

Thanks

Re: %QUOTE

PaigeMiller — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 14:44:59 GMT

%QUOTE should be used on macro variables if they could possibly contain special characters that could cause confusion on the part of the macro processor. The documentation for %QUOTE indicates which characters are considered special characters.

%QUOTE would never be used on just plain text, for example %QUOTE(NONE) is not appropriate use of %QUOTE.

Re: %QUOTE

pchappus — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 14:48:37 GMT

Okay, I think I might need it around the marco variable then.

I'm trying to read in a text file that has a quoted email address like the following:

"XXXX@gmail.com"

When I use the code to send this, it is looking like it is stripping the quotes and causing it to not send the email.

If I instead put the following in the text file that gets read in with the email address, it works:

"XXXX@gmail.com" "XXXX@gmail.com"

For some reason, when I have two quoted email address I don't have a problem.

Thanks,

Re: %QUOTE

pchappus — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 15:23:41 GMT

The issue appears to be maybe in the PROC import. Trying to find out if PROC import strips the quotes from a quoted string.

Paul

Re: %QUOTE

Tom — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:02:11 GMT

@pchappus wrote:

The issue appears to be maybe in the PROC import. Trying to find out if PROC import strips the quotes from a quoted string.

Paul

Are you reading from a CSV file (delimited text file)? In a CSV file quotes around values are considered optional and are removed.

That is how you can have values in your file that contain the comma (or whatever delimiter you are using) and still be able to parse the lines. If your values contain actual quotes then the value should be quoted and any embedded quotes (of the same type as the values is enclosed in) need to doubled up. For SAS you can use either single or double quote characters on the outside.

So for example a record that had NAME='Smith, Fred' and email='fred.smith@company.org' and nickname='"Rock"' would be written to a CSV file like this:

Name,Email,Nickname
"Smith, Fred",fred.smith@company.org,"""Rock"""

If you do have a CSV file and you want to preserve the quotes around a particular columns values you can use the ~ modifier on the INPUT statement.

data test ;
 length name email nickname $50 ;
 infile cards dsd truncover firstobs=2;
 input name email nickname ~;
cards;
Name,Email,Nickname
"Smith, Fred",fred.smith@company.org,"Rock"
;;;;

Obs       name                email             nickname

 1     Smith, Fred    fred.smith@company.org     "Rock"

Re: %QUOTE

Tom — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:07:24 GMT

Note that to the macro processor quotes are part of the value. To the macro processor everything is just text so there is no need to add quotes around stings to help the parser figure out that the word is not meant as a number or variable name or keyword.

So if your macro variable contains XXX and you compare it to "XXX" it will not match since one starts with X and the other with a double quote character.

%let email = fred.smith@company.org ;
...
%if &email = fred.smith@company.org %then %do;
%put Sending email to Fred ;
...
%end;

Re: %QUOTE

Ksharp — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 14:38:57 GMT

%QUOTE is obsolete . It can't mask single/double quote , use %bquote() instead.

For now ,generally consider these three macro mask function %BQUOTE() %NRBQUOTE() %SUPERQ()