topic SAS comment in SAS Programming

SAS comment

marcuswong — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:42:00 GMT

Hi Members,

Please help me to understand the SAS documentation that says:

======================================================================

SAS comment statements of the form

*commentary;

comment commentary;

are complete SAS statements. Consequently, they are processed by the tokenizer and macro facility and cannot contain semicolons or unmatched quotation marks.

=======================================================================

My understand from the above documentation is that comments in this form are complete statements, and they can’t contain semicolons or unmatched quotation marks. And I am confused about the unmatched quotation marks because when I write the below program, SAS run it with no problem.

=======================================================================

proc print data=sashelp.cars;
*comme'''ntary;
run;

Re: SAS comment

PaigeMiller — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:48:27 GMT

@marcuswong wrote:

======================================================================

SAS comment statements of the form

*commentary;

or

comment commentary;

are complete SAS statements. Consequently, they are processed by the tokenizer and macro facility and cannot contain semicolons or unmatched quotation marks.

=======================================================================

Interesting. I don't see the text you quote in the SAS documentation at https://documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=pgmsascdc&cdcVersion=9.4_3.5&docsetId=lestmtsglobal&docsetTarget=n1v51exifva71an1cvfn2z6j26lo.htm&locale=en

Where is it from?

Re: SAS comment

CurtisMackWSIPP — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:51:10 GMT

This is very interesting. This would have caused problems in the past. I wonder if SAS finally fixed that flaw in their system.

Re: SAS comment

ballardw — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:47:38 GMT

@marcuswong wrote:

Hi Members,

Please help me to understand the SAS documentation that says:

======================================================================

SAS comment statements of the form

*commentary;

or

comment commentary;

are complete SAS statements. Consequently, they are processed by the tokenizer and macro facility and cannot contain semicolons or unmatched quotation marks.

=======================================================================

My understand from the above documentation is that comments in this form are complete statements, and they can’t contain semicolons or unmatched quotation marks. And I am confused about the unmatched quotation marks because when I write the below program, SAS run it with no problem.

=======================================================================

proc print data=sashelp.cars;
*comme'''ntary;
run;

The code you show is not involving the Macro facility.

Try this where the comment appears inside a macro:

%macro dummy;

proc print data=sashelp.cars;
*comme'''ntary;
run;

%mend;

options mprint;
%dummy;

If you are using macros basically you should either use the /* */ style of commenting or %*<text> ; to prevent the macro system from trying to interpret the comment.

Re: SAS comment

marcuswong — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 02:00:33 GMT

@PaigeMiller @ballardw @CurtisMackWSIPP Thank you for the guidance.

Now I understand the clause is applying to comment within a macro.