topic Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments in SAS Programming

ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

SeptemberX — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 06:32:17 GMT

Hi,

I am recently learning SAS by doing project for my advisor.

Could anyone can help me figure out what is wrong with my code and how to fix it?

proc sql noprint; /*firmid is a macro var containing values of udbnum from temp*/

select udbnum

into: firmid separated by ','

from temp;

quit;

Then I want to refer to elements in firmid using the following code

%let fid=%sysfunc(strip(%sysfunc(scan(&firmid,1,','))));

In the real problem, I actually used a loop to scan all the elements in firmid, but the error is the same when I simply put 1,2,3, ... in the scan function

ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many

arguments.

ERROR: The function STRIP referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too few

arguments.

I will really appreciate it if someone can help.

Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

SeptemberX — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 14:45:35 GMT

It turned out that I need use %bquote rather than %str to mask those commas in the macro firmid

Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

ballardw — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:34:25 GMT

You will find when working with macros that you can simplify this drastically using the %scan function.

%let fid = %scan(&firmid,1,',');

And the macro processor almost never needs "strip" .

Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

ballardw — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 17:23:56 GMT

Interesting comment considering your original post doesn't show %str in it.

Did you try %scan?

Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

SeptemberX — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 17:33:39 GMT

The followings are what I tried,

%let fid=%sysfunc(strip(%sysfunc(scan(%str(&firmid),1,',')))); not work

%let fid=%sysfunc(strip(%sysfunc(scan(%bquote(&firmid),1,',')))); this works

I will be happy to know what happened here

Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

Ksharp — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 13:28:19 GMT

%let fid = %scan(&firmid,1,%str(,));

Re: ERROR: The function SCAN referenced by the %SYSFUNC or %QSYSFUNC macro function has too many arguments

Tom — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 13:56:06 GMT

You do not need to resort to %SYSFUNC() to scan since there is a built in macro function %SCAN().

In macro code everything is a string, so there is no need to put quotes around string literals to let the parser know you are representing a string.

There is no need to "strip" macro variables. If for some strange reason you have managed to create a macro variable that has leading and/or trailing unquoted spaces then you can use a simple %LET statement to remove them. %let x= a ; is the same as %let x=a; since the unquoted spaces are ignored.

It is easier in macro coding if you do not use a comma as your delimiter.

proc sql noprint;

select udbnum

into :firmid separated by '|'

from temp

;

%let nobs=&sqlobs ;

quit;

%do i=1 %to &nobs ;

%let fid=%scan(&firmid,&i,|) ;

...

%end;