topic Re: can you ignore an apostrophe in a %put when commenting to log in SAS Programming

can you ignore an apostrophe in a %put when commenting to log

deboershapes — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 02:10:33 GMT

i want to write a comment to the log and i want to use an apostrophe in my comment.

below is a sample code illuminating the issue.

the first %put statement using double quotes as a work around but the comment in the log will have the double quotes and this maybe undesirable. the second %put statement fails and causes problems going forward in the code for the third %put statement because it is interpreted a using single quotes and thus is expecting a closing single quote. is there a way to use an apostrophe in this situation and have it be ignored as a single quotes string initiator?

code sample:

%let x=5;
%let date_today=&sysdate;
%put "today's date is: &date_today and &sysdate.";
%put today's date is: &date_today and &sysdate.;
%put my number x is: &x.;

Re: can you ignore an apostrophe in a %put when commenting to log

Tom — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 03:09:47 GMT

Use macro quoting. Such as %bquote() which allows unbalanced quotes.

422  %put %bquote(today's date is: %sysfunc(today(),date9.).);
today's date is: 03OCT2022.

Re: can you ignore an apostrophe in a %put when commenting to log

deboershapes — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 04:43:42 GMT

Thanks it worked. It had a side effect of breaking the code coloring scheme (in sas studio). To work around that I added an apostrophe commented out directly after it like this

%let date_today=&sysdate;
%put %bquote(today's date is &date_today and &sysdate..);*';

before:

after: