topic Re: How can I run a macro over a list of inputs? in SAS Programming

How can I run a macro over a list of inputs?

tmcwill — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 16:20:08 GMT

I created a SAS macro, lets call it mymacro, that takes a single string as input. I have a list of about 30 strings (with no pattern) that I need to run the macro for. I thought I could somehow put the strings in an array and then create another macro that loops the original macro over each item in the array, but I can't find information on how to create an array outside of a data step.

For example:

List of input to mymacro : foo, world, dog, cat, tree, ...

Need a more efficient way of doing:

%mymacro(foo)

%mymacro(world)

%mymacro(dog)

...

I'm sure there is a simple way of doing this, but I'm fairly new to macros in SAS. Thanks in advance!

Re: How can I run a macro over a list of inputs?

ballardw — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 16:27:45 GMT

If the "list" is space delimited I might suggest a macro "driver" to call your macro:

%macro driver (parmlist);
%do i=1 %to %sysfunc(countw(&parmlist.));
   %let word = %scan(&parmlist.,&i.);
   %mymacro (&word.);
%end;
%mend;

%driver (<your list goes here>)

DO not use this with a comma delimited list as commas are default macro parameter separators and causes issues.

If you have used a specific character to delimit your strings then it would go in the third position of %scan above. You may want to check the documentation for %scan to get the default list of delimiters.

Re: How can I run a macro over a list of inputs?

tmcwill — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 16:34:42 GMT

My list was space delimited, so this was exactly what I needed. Thank you!

Re: How can I run a macro over a list of inputs?

AMSAS — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 16:35:30 GMT

If your list is in a SAS dataset then you could do this:

options mlogic symbolgen ;
/* Create Sample Data */
data sample ;
	infile cards ;
	input string:$12. ;
cards;
This
is
my
test
data 
;

/* Sample Macro */
%macro myMacro(param1) ;
	put "param1 :" &param1 ;
%mend ;

data _null_ ;
	/* read Sample data and call macro passing a parameter */
	set sample ;
	%myMacro(string) ;
run ;