topic Put a single apostrophe in front of macro variable value in SAS Programming

Put a single apostrophe in front of macro variable value

pkopersk — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:36:57 GMT

Hello,

I have a user defined macro variable as follows:

%let dfinactg='31jul2018'd;

data suivi;

set suivi;

attrib rundate format=ddmmyy10.;

rundate=%str(&dfinactg);

runyear=%sysfunc(year("&sysdate9"d));

run;

I want to reinsert this variable in the output dataset so I can refer to it in an excel file.

The issue is that the value gets interpreted as a date and when I concatenate it with text like this ="Situation: " & 'Raw Data'!$S$2 &" Broker" (where 'Raw Data'!$S$2 refers to a cell containing the value 07/31/2018 it converts this value to a datenumber.

To resolve this issue, I want to put a single apostrophe like this '07/31/2018 so excel is forced to interpret it as a string.

I haven't succeeded to do so in SAS

Best

Re: Put a single apostrophe in front of macro variable value

Reeza — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:59:38 GMT

Instead, you can use TEXT function within Excel and convert the value to a date. This way you can change the format easily within Excel if needed as well. That would be my suggestion. There are a lot of benefits to having a date formatted as date.

Re: Put a single apostrophe in front of macro variable value

mkeintz — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 21:19:54 GMT

I often use date literal expressions as macrovars, but don't include the quotes (whether double or single) in the value assigned to the macrovar. Instead

%let dfinactg=31jul2018;

Then you can

data suivi;

set suivi;

attrib rundate format=ddmmyy10.;

rundate="&dfinactg"d;

runyear=%sysfunc(year("&sysdate9"d));

run;

In other words, construct the user-defined macrovar dfinactg the same as the system defines variable sydate9.