topic Re: tRUE OR fALSE? in SAS Programming

tRUE OR fALSE?

robertrao — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:17:43 GMT

Hi Team,

Scan is a macro function but Trim is not so is the difference in its usage!!

%let thisvar=%scan(&varnames,&ii,%str( ));

%let x=%sysfunc(trim(%sysfunc(left(&num))));

Thanks

Re: tRUE OR fALSE?

art297 — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:14:16 GMT

Not sure what your question is. scan is not a macro function, but %scan is. %sysfunc is a macro function that lets us use SAS functions. In your example, you asked about trim, but not about the similar 'left'.

Of course, you could replace the two with %sysfunc(strip(whatever))

Re: tRUE OR fALSE?

robertrao — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:18:52 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for the reply,

My question was why we could not go for:

%trim instead of %sysfunc(trim(whatever) as we did for %scan???

Thanks

Re: tRUE OR fALSE?

Tom — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:37:26 GMT

Art already answered your question. Remember that macro code it just a tool to automate the generation of text that SAS can interpret as code. Trying to think of it as a real programming language will probably get you in trouble.

Re: tRUE OR fALSE?

Linlin — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:39:51 GMT

Tom, How is Sandy doing in your area?

Re: tRUE OR fALSE?

Astounding — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:03:54 GMT

As you have found, most functions just don't exist in macro language. That's why %sysfunc was invented, to allow other functions to be called by macro language. Also note, if your objective is to strip leading and trailing blanks from a macro variable, you don't need a function to do it:

%let a = &a;

The %let statement will ignore the leading and trailing blanks to the right of the equal sign.

Good luck.

Re: tRUE OR fALSE?

Ksharp — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 03:31:34 GMT

There are already some built-in macro function, include TRIM and LEFT .

%let x=%trim(%left(whatever));