topic macro parameter with concatenate names in SAS Programming

macro parameter with concatenate names

chenyiwen1717 — Tue, 09 May 2017 23:46:16 GMT

Hi All,

I have mutitlple SAS data sets with names file91 to file14. The last two digits represents years (e.g.91 represents 1991 and 00 represents 2000). I tried to run a macro to generate some results by reading these names. However, I failed to concanate file names within the macro. Could you one help? Thanks.

%macro getall;

	%do i=91 %to 99;  /*year 1991 to 1999*/
	%getpart1(file&i);
	%end;

	%do i=0 %to 14;  /*year 2000 to 2014*/
	%getpart2(%sysfunc(cats('file',put(&i,z2.))));
	%end;

%mend getall;
%getall

Re: macro parameter with concatenate names

Astounding — Tue, 09 May 2017 23:57:09 GMT

Assuming that somewhere you have properly defined %GETPART1 and %GETPART2, your top loop should be fine (Of course I'm not yet convinced that you have defined those other macros, but you'll be able to comment about that easily enough.)

The bottom loop requires a few changes, though. CATS is not needed to concatenate strings in macro language, nor are quotes needed to define a character string. And %SYSFUNC cannot be applied to PUT (only to PUTN or PUTC). So you would need:

%do i=0 %to 14;

%getpart2 (file%sysfunc(putn(&i, z2)))

%end;

Re: macro parameter with concatenate names

Reeza — Wed, 10 May 2017 01:15:24 GMT

You can also use a single loop:

%macro getall;
    %do year=1991 %to 2014;
        %put file%substr(&year, 3, 2);
    %end;
%mend getall;

%getall;

Re: macro parameter with concatenate names

RW9 — Wed, 10 May 2017 09:07:10 GMT

Firstly, I would always suggest to combine all "like" data together in one dataset - with a date column for the year if need be. This will considerably shrink your programming effort and make your life much easier.

You can of course loop by using:

data _null_;
  set sashelp.vtable (where=(libname="WORK" and substr(memname,1,4)="FILE"));
  /* This bit gets generated for each filexx dataset */
  call execute('%getpart1 ('||strip(memname)||');');
  call execute('%getpart2 ('||strip(memname)||');');
run;

You don't need any hardcoding or loops then of the files, as anything in work with the prefix file will be processed.

I would still recommend combining them though.

Re: macro parameter with concatenate names

chenyiwen1717 — Wed, 10 May 2017 16:49:44 GMT

Thanks Astounding. This is exactly what I want! I shouldn't put the concatenate function or quotes to concatenate string in macro! This sloved my question!