topic Re: BATCH vs. INTERACTIVE EG-SESSION in SAS Programming

BATCH vs. INTERACTIVE EG-SESSION

FK1 — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 09:34:47 GMT

Hello Everybody,

I came upon a very curious problem:

I have a code in which I use name literals:

data "dataset mit leerzeichen"n;
set sashelp.class;
"variable mit leerzeichen"n = 1;
run;

Now, when I run the above code in a interactive EG-Session, it works perfectly fine, i.e. no errors or warnings.

However, when I run the exact same code in Batch-Mode, I get the following ERROR MESSAGE:

ERROR: The name variable mit leerzeichen is not a valid SAS name.

Obviously, there must exist some differences in BATCH vs. INTERACTIVE EG-SESSION mode. Related to the above issue, what is the difference?
Is there a system option, that forces SAS BATCH-MODE to work exactly as in INTERACTIVE EG-SESSION mode?

Thanks in advance for any helpful pointing into the direction of solving this issue.

ChrisBrooks — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:13:35 GMT

Try putting the following two options statements at the start of your code

options validmemname=extend;
options validvarname=any;

data "dataset mit leerzeichen"n;
set sashelp.class;
"variable mit leerzeichen"n = 1;
run;

I can only assume you're using different autoexecs when running in batch and interactive with one containing the options and one not.

FK1 — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 15:50:27 GMT

Hello Mr. Brooks,

thank you for your advice. It worked!

I do have a follow-up question, however:

Do you know how to output the system options into a SAS data set? I only get them into the LOG, when executing this code:

PROC OPTIONS;
RUN;

As a workaround one could of course divert the log with PROC PRINTTO:

filename divlog "/pathname/logdiverted.txt";

PROC PRINTTO LOG=divlog;
run;

PROC OPTIONS   ;
RUN;

However, I end up having a file on which I then would have to further work on.

ChrisBrooks — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 15:54:23 GMT

You can use Proc Optsave for that i.e.

proc optsave out=opts;
run;

ballardw — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 17:29:14 GMT

@ChrisBrooks wrote:

You can use Proc Optsave for that i.e.
proc optsave out=opts;
run;

and reload the options with

Proc optload data=opts;

run;

if you need to make option settings temporarily and then restore them (as often as needed).

FK1 — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 11:49:58 GMT

Thanks everybody for your help! Glad to see, there are so many SAS Specialists 🙂