topic Re: Disappearing percent sign in RTF column title in SAS Programming

Disappearing percent sign in RTF column title

PGStats — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:02:20 GMT

Hi,

Can somebody tell me what happens to my percent character in the column title produced by:

data test; x=0.1; run;

ods rtf file="&sasforum.\Reports\test percent.rtf" style=journal;

proc sql;
select x label='% Detected' format=percentn7.1
from test;
quit;

ods rtf close;

Re: Disappearing percent sign in RTF column title

ballardw — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:29:46 GMT

Don't know why the RTF generator eats it but try '\% Detected'. I think the \ acts as an RTF escape character.

My guess is the % at the start of a string indicates some kind of predicate or code otherwise.

Re: Disappearing percent sign in RTF column title

PGStats — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 01:23:30 GMT

Thanks , I finally found it in the Doc. I thought that you could use anything as a label in SQL. Not so! There are rules:

A label can begin with the following characters: a through z, A through Z, 0 through 9, an underscore (_), or a blank space. If you begin a label with any other character, such as pound sign (#), then that character is used as a split character and it splits the label onto the next line wherever it appears. For example: select dropout label= '#Percentage of#Students Who#Dropped Out' from educ(obs=5);

If a special character must appear as the first character in the output, then precede it with a space or a forward slash (/).

So, my percent sign was used as a split character, which is why it was ignored.