topic Re: The strangest thing ever in SAS Programming

What does error message "not a valid SAS name" mean?

whealthest88 — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 12:18:20 GMT

My colleagues created 4 SAS datasets in a common directory. While I can freely create and use any SAS dataset in that directory, and other teammates can freely read and process these 4 datasets, I just can’t.

Dataset Name Error Message

Close_variance_file.sas7bdat The value VARIANCE ID is not a valid SAS name.

Open_variance_file.sas7bdat The value VARIANCE ID is not a valid SAS name.

Mlone_accounts_file.sas7bdat The value UNIQUE ID is not a valid SAS name.

Variance_security_file.sas7bdat The value VARIANCE ID is not a valid SAS name.

What are these error messages supposed to mean? Make NO sense AT ALL.

Re: The strangest thing ever

ballardw — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:01:22 GMT

Likely you have a different setting for the VALIDVARNAME option.

Run this code:

proc options option=validvarname;

run;

You will likely get this in the log:

VALIDVARNAME=V7   Specifies the rules for valid SAS variable names that can be created and
                   processed during a SAS session.

if your colleagues run the same code I suspect that the result will be VALIDVARNAME=ANY, which allows SAS to use non-standard variable names.

Re: The strangest thing ever

ChrisNZ — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:43:46 GMT

Please change the thread title to: What does error message "not a valid SAS name" mean?