topic Need to compare two sas MACRO VARIABLE containing string in SAS Programming

Need to compare two sas MACRO VARIABLE containing string

PSIOT — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 12:46:04 GMT

Hi,

I need to compare two macro variables containig string in macro program but it doesn't work.

Please see my code :

%if &currentdateFile = &LastDateFileToImport %then %do;

It seems that this condition is always true.

Where is my mistake?

Thanks a lot for your help

Re: Need to compare two sas MACRO VARIABLE containing string

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 12:49:58 GMT

%put currentdateFile="&currentdateFile";
%put LastDateFileToImport="&LastDateFileToImport";

immediately before your %if and then post the log of this.

Re: Need to compare two sas MACRO VARIABLE containing string

RW9 — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 12:54:18 GMT

What do those macro variables resolve to? I can tell nothing from that snippet.

To test macro variable and such like:

options mlogic mprint symbolgen;

Put that before your program and you will see in the log all the information you need, its likely to be a spaces issue, or casing or something similar.

To note, you don't need to do the process that way at all. If you show your code, then can advise, but if its text files, you can do in one datastep, and if Excel files or something, a dir list and datastep to generate a proc import for each dir would be simpler:

file mytemp pipe 'dir "c:\some\where\*.xlsx" /b';

data _null_;
  length bf $2000;
  infile mytemp dlm="¬";
  input bf $;
  call execute('proc import datafile="c:\some\where\'||strip(bf)||'" out=mydata'||strip(put(_n_,best.))||'; run;');
run;

This does a dir - then generates a proc import for each file in that dir, out is set as mydataX, where X is the row number. You can modify as per your data.

Re: Need to compare two sas MACRO VARIABLE containing string

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 12:54:20 GMT

It also may be that the macro is used in a way that makes it appear as if the condition is always true.

To determine that, you would need to post the whole macro code and the Base SAS code where it is used.

Re: Need to compare two sas MACRO VARIABLE containing string

PSIOT — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 13:57:18 GMT

Thank you for your help.

The answer is %if "&currentdateFile" = "&LastDateFileToImport" %then %do;