topic Re: Using COUNTW function on macro variables in SAS Programming

Using COUNTW function on macro variables

emikea — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 19:58:50 GMT

I'm hoping for some help in understanding the results I'm getting in the following code.

%let test =;

%put test has a word count of %sysfunc(countw(test));

In the case of an empty macro variable, countw returns a value of 1. I'd like the result to be 0 in this case, which seems like it should be the result, but I'm clearly missing something in the documentation. Is there a way to have this return 0 by using some combination of optional arguments? If so, what would that be?

Thanks.

Re: Using COUNTW function on macro variables

PaigeMiller — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 20:19:50 GMT

I think you might want to use

%put test has a word count of %sysfunc(countw(&test));

And furthermore, you might want to perform a test of &test to make sure it isn't an empty string, which it is in your example. If its an empty string, you can return a value of 0 and branch around the actual use of countw

Re: Using COUNTW function on macro variables

emikea — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 20:23:11 GMT

My apologies. Leaving out the ampersand was a typo.

I'm actually trying to have countw return 0 when the string is empty. It seems like that should be the result.

Re: Using COUNTW function on macro variables

Tom — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 21:01:20 GMT

It is problem with the way that %SYSFUNC() parses and passes the arguments to the function.

You could either test first or just append a space (or whatever you delimiter is) to the end of the argument.

%put %sysfunc(countw(&test%str( )));

Re: Using COUNTW function on macro variables

emikea — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 23:32:31 GMT

Thank you Tom.

Re: Using COUNTW function on macro variables

Ksharp — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 08:11:56 GMT

That is weird. I got ERROR info running your code .

%let test =;

%put test has a word count of %sysfunc(countw(%bquote(&test)));

test has a word count of 0