topic Re: How to Mask a Period in Executing a Macro in SAS Programming

How to Mask a Period in Executing a Macro

EricCai — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 00:51:05 GMT

Dear Community,

My macro is looping through an array of numbers.

%let cutoff = 90 95 96 96.5;

The macro works just fine for the integers, but not for the numbers with decimal marks. For 96.5, the macro thinks that it is 2 separate numbers - 96 and 5.

The %STR and %NRSTR functions do not mask periods.

How can I make the macro to recognize 96.5 properly?

I think that a masking macro function is needed, but I can't fine one.

Thanks,

Eric

Re: How to Mask a Period in Executing a Macro

Jagadishkatam — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 01:10:03 GMT

Hi,

I have created a dummy dataset by using the macro variable with the values provided and it has created a dataset without any problem. Could you please check the below code and let me know if this is not the way you want to use it.

%let cutoff = 90 95 96 96.5;

%put &cutoff;

data have;

array mac(4) (&cutoff);

do i = 1 to 4;

new=mac(i);

output;

end;

run;

Thanks,

Jag

Re: How to Mask a Period in Executing a Macro

Tom — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 03:08:47 GMT

You will need to provide more about how you are using the values.

Perhaps you are using the %SCAN() function? The default delimiters for %SCAN() do include a period, but you can specify the delimiters you want to use.

%let cutoff = 90 95 96 96.5;

%do i=1 %to %countw(&cutoff,%str( ));

%let value=%scan(&cutoff,&i,%str( ));

...

%end;

Re: How to Mask a Period in Executing a Macro

EricCai — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 04:32:55 GMT

Ahh...yes, thank you, Tom. I did not specify the delimiter when I used %SCAN(). Once I corrected that with %STR( ), the macro worked.

Thank you!

And thank you, Jagadishkatam, for providing your sample code!