topic call symput() in SAS Programming

call symput()

JonesSmith — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 15:56:20 GMT

Hi, expert

Most of the time when I come to CALL SMPUT() in daily programming work, I always get unexpected macro errors. Please help to correct me.

I always need to set a macro to store the exact days of certain month in financial report and retrieve them in data steps. But the newly created variables yy, mm and dd are all in 20178 (ie 2015-3-31), not 2015-3-1, 2015-3-2....... and 2015-3-31 as I expect.

e.g.

%macro report;
data report;
do loop=mdy(3,1,2015) to mdy(3,31,2015);
call symput("x",loop); /* where &x in dates need to be referred in later part */;

xx=&x;

       cyear=year(&x);
       cmonth=month(&x);
       cdate=day(&x);

output;
end;
run;
%mend report;

%report;

regards

jones

Re: call symput()

Reeza — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:33:14 GMT

This is the correct behaviour. SAS stored dates as numbers, where 1 is Jan 1, 1960 and 2 is Jan 2, 1960 and so forth.

If you want a specified display format you need to apply a format. Note that it will have leading zeros, ie 04 and 01 in month/day values

For a year month day format, such as 2014-04-01 use

call symput("x",put(loop, yymmddd10.);

Re: call symput()

Cynthia_sas — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:43:34 GMT

Hi:

In SAS dates, 0 is January 1, 1960 and 1 is January 2, 1960 and -1 is Dec 31, 1959. You can run this program to see that 0 is Jan 1, 1960.

Cynthia

data whatdate;

infile datalines;

input thedate;

put "Internal value " thedate= 'Now formatted: ' thedate= mmddyy10.;

return;

datalines;

-1

-2

-3334

18439

19912

;

run;

Re: call symput()

Reeza — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:46:19 GMT

Thanks for the correction!

Re: call symput()

JonesSmith — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 01:17:09 GMT

Thanks for your help.

regards

jones

Re: call symput()

Ksharp — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:17:32 GMT

Maybe that error be generated by blank in macro variable. Try call symputX() .

Re: call symput()

RW9 — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:37:32 GMT

Hi,

I am not sure on the point of your macro. You are going to hit problems as you are generating a macro variable with a datastep loop. So the macro pre-processor gets your code, it does a search and replace on the &x. and finds nothing delclared for X so it throws an error, it never gets to the stage where the datastep is actually run to create X.

In your example X always referencing the last mdy, this is because the loop goes over each time and only the last iteration sets the date.

So first question, what is it your trying to achieve? Is it to find all dates within that range and use them to select data, if so then store to dataset and use this in your code, e.g.:

data dates;

attrib mydate format=date9.;

do loop=mdy(3,1,2015) to mdy(3,31,2015);

mydate=loop;

output;
end;
run;

/*later on */

proc sql;

create table DATA_TO_WORK_ON as

select *

from DATA_I_HAVE

where DATE in (select MYDATE from WORK.DATES);

quit;

Re: call symput()

JonesSmith — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 23:34:02 GMT

That's great ! Thank you all of you.