topic Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error in SAS Programming

"NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Paul_NYS — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 15:39:01 GMT

Hi Everyone

I have been running SAS programs using the same directory for a year now. I have been working on a program that has been running fine (minus usual de-bugging issues). However today, when I am trying to run the same program in the same directory, I am getting the below error (in bold). I have changed nothing to prompt it.

Does anyone know how to resolve this? I looked at some past older threads and did not see anything that I could use.

Paul

1 ;*';*";*/;quit;run;

2 OPTIONS PAGENO=MIN;

3 %LET _CLIENTTASKLABEL='test_metric1_judge_8_22_13_test';

4 %LET _CLIENTPROJECTPATH='F:\MetricFiles\2013_Changes\test_judgeData_8_6_13.egp';

5 %LET _CLIENTPROJECTNAME='test_judgeData_8_6_13.egp';

6 %LET _SASPROGRAMFILE='I:\CIP_projects\data-metrics\SAS\2013JudgeData\test_metric1_judge_8_22_13_test.sas';

__________________________________________

NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string might change in a future SAS release. Inserting white space between a quoted string and the succeeding identifier is recommended.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Tom — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 16:25:57 GMT

Looks like unbalanced quotes. Did you change the AUTOEXEC? Or issue some commands using -INITSTMT configuration option?

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Paul_NYS — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 16:35:06 GMT

No, not at all. I don't understand it.

Paul

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

jakarman — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:32:45 GMT

It is a note as it is no error yet. As you are running eguide to a 9 version of SAS while it shows normal generated code this note is strange.

In the shown code the issue is not visible but possible it is coming from elsewhere. Try a dummy empty file as sas source to eliminate this option.

There has been a code convention change in the 8 to 9 conversion or even earlier.

See:

3353 - SAS literals in PUT statement generate errors

18952 - Note in the log might cause red X to be displayed in the Project view ofSAS Enterprise Guide

The top 10 errors, notes and warnings that prompt DATA step programmers to call SAS Technical Support - Key Happenings at support.sas

The introduce named literal string is indidcating for more strict syntax coding conventions.

In the old day-s being limited by 72 postions on a punch card it made sense to save space. That is history.

SAS(R) 9.4 Language Reference: Concepts ( SAS Constants in Expressions - Avoiding a Common Error with Constants)

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Paul_NYS — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 18:02:17 GMT

I actually can't even create a dummy file--I keep getting the same warning, which stops processing.

Here is the entire log file (not that long): http://www.nycourts.gov/surveys/cwcip/log-8-25-13.zip

Paul

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Astounding — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 18:33:14 GMT

SAS supports a few cases where a letter immediately following a closed quote changes the meaning of the string. For example:

'some long name'n

'25Aug2013'd

It looks like your first line is unbalancing the quotes, so that SAS considers all your open quotes to be closing quotes. Try starting a fresh SAS session and removing the first line.

Good luck.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Paul_NYS — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 19:15:07 GMT

The first lines in the program are generated by Enterprise Guide automatically. My first code lines in the program are just libref statements:

**lib refs**;

libname Raw 'F:\MetricFiles\7_2013_judge\Combine';

libname Dict 'F:\MetricFiles\7_2013_judge\Dictionaries';

libname SASd 'F:\MetricFiles\7_2013_judge\SASdata';

libname met 'F:\MetricFiles\7_2013_judge\metrics_final';

Paul

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Astounding — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 19:27:05 GMT

Just a a few diagnostic tests to try out ... not a solution ...

1. Does the NOTE disappear if you insert a blank after each of the open quotes?

2. If you remove all of the quotes that you have control over, are you able to run code subsequent to that?

You would need to start a separate EG session for each test.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

jakarman — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 19:54:37 GMT

Agree with diagnostic testing.
Would start:

1/ create new eg.project (testinfra.egp) with the sas program contents: Proc options ; run;

Close the appserver and run this program. It should open up the appserver (WS) again.

Result options:

a/ The error is still there? Your infra appserver got courrupted. Tom-s suggestions are good candidates to start.

b/ No error? The problem is somewhere in your own code. Try to submit step for step your code to get it to the point it will give problems

Disconnectin/restarting the WS server is needed as Asounding stated

In the EG-code line 1-6 is genereated and line 1 is the "magic string" that should elminate this kind of quoting problems.

I know one exception and that is some weird behanvior caused by using macro comment statements (%* )

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Paul_NYS — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 13:27:01 GMT

Hi Astounding, Jaap

Based on the above, I created a new project and imported the same SAS program into it initially ran it as is without touching the quotes. It seemed to run fine actually. I don't know if it will last, but it seems to working OK within the new project, which I don't understand, since nothing else is different, but I will keep working with it today and replay back with the result.

Paul

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

shadigood — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 17:46:52 GMT

Reading page 3 of this paper might help:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings11/262-2011.pdf

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Ksharp — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 03:00:22 GMT

It seems that quote problem.

Not sure . If it could work .

%LET _CLIENTTASKLABEL=%str( %'test_metric1_judge_8_22_13_test%' );

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Uditg_ucla — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 22:01:20 GMT

This is always a tricky problem, specially when it gets thrown for something that you were running successfully until recently. And there doesn't seem to be any simple one-step solution for it. Most searches online ended up in dead-ends for me.

So are few solutions which did or did not work for me:
1) a single or double quote used in a comment inside the Macro - even though its inside a comment, it somehow manages to trigger this warning

2) adding extra space before & after, each instance of single/double quote - this never helped (though it did make me search and understand the difference between using single vs double quote)

3) Using 'PUTN' function - this one was most recent. So maybe there are others functions too, which throw this warning!!

My suggestion would be, try commenting your code piece-by-piece and then running it after restarting SAS). Or in case you made any recent changes, start with them first.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Tom — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 15:22:50 GMT

Your log does NOT have the full set of SAS code that was submitted. What version of Enterprise Guide are you using? With version 6.1 you can change the settings by using menu Tools -> Options to see the options window. Then under Tasks -> Tasks General there is a check box for "Display all generated SAS code in task output". Check that Box and hopefully you will see the line of text that the SAS log says has happened on line 49.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

andrewm — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 15:09:50 GMT

I would side with answers that point to macro comments as the likely issue.

I had a [ %macro comment; ] statement followed by some unused code, having read here (http://www.sys-seminar.com/EE/Files/staceyphillips.pdf) that creating %macro comment and not calling the macro is a good way to comment out sections of code.

I used that approach, with a macro comment statement followed by some optional SAS code I did not intend to execute (that section included some regular commented out text, using * ... ; and /* ... */ methods).

The "NOTE 49-169" problem began immediately after running this macro-commented-out section. The only solution seemed to be restarting EG.

So, if you have any macro comment sections, or macros with comments in them, I suggest removing the macro comment and using some other method for commenting out that section of code, and/or experimenting with different types of comments within that macro to maybe pinpoint the problematic syntax.

p.s. A potentially better approach to using a macro for commenting out sections of SAS code is mentioned in this post, although I have not tested it (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12011887/commenting-out-sections-of-code-for-testing).

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Emily_Zhang — Fri, 20 May 2016 06:17:43 GMT

It seems that the single quote can not be used in annotation in sas macros.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

Jems — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:12:51 GMT

Whenever i am getting this note i close the sas session and the reopen.Then there will be no more notes and truncation!But i am really interested in knowing the root cause,is it a bug.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

dbianco — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 16:15:58 GMT

I know this is a late reply but I recently had this problem and found my issue. I am using SAS EG and ran part of a macro but didn't run the %mend. I then went to run all of my code and got the "NOTE 49-169" issue. SAS doesn't fully dump it's memory so the unbalance of not having %mend creates the note/error. This is why closing the program and then opening and re-running the program "fixes" the problem. A quick solution is to only run the line "%mend" which will generate an error. Ignore the error. Then try re-running all of your code and there should be no issues.

Re: "NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string....." error

saskir — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 19:57:45 GMT

Hello Paul_NYS,

The most common cause of this note is code that was submitted that contains unbalanced quotes. The circumvention is to add the missing quote and save your code. In Base SAS, you can try submitting the following line of syntax. Most of the time this statement will allow SAS to recover from the missing quote and you will not have to restart SAS.

;*%mend;*);*';*";**/;
run;

If the this does not allow SAS to recover, you will have to restart SAS.

If you are running in Enterprise Guide, the circumvention is the same. You will have to add the missing quote quote and save your code. However, EG automatically submits the above line of syntax that allows you to recover from the missing quote. Simply resubmitting your code should allow you continue in the current EG session. If you are still receiving the note even after correcting the unbalanced quotes, you will have to restart your EG session.

As some of the folks who responded have mentioned, unbalanced quotes within a comment within a macro definition can also generate this note. The note listed below goes into more detail, but basically, both asterisk-style and macro-style comments are still tokenized by SAS. This means that an unmatched quote within these styles of comments is still seen as the start of a string literal. SAS always expects a closing quote to end a string litteral.

http://support.sas.com/kb/32/684.html

The best way to prevent problems with unmatched quotes contained within comments is to always use PL/1 style comments within a macro. This type of comment is not tokenized so quotes are not seen as the start to a string literal.

If the cause of the note is a quote within a comment, the circumvention is to change the comment to a PL/1 style comment and save your code. You can then try and submit the following line of code to restore your SAS session. If that does not allow you to recover, you will have to restart your SAS session.

;*%mend;*);*';*";**/;
run;

The final common cause for this issue is a quoted string that contains a macro variable that was created using a macro quoting function. Below is a simple example. This problem is most likely to occur when the macro variable is the last thing listed in the quoted string.

%_eg_hidenotesandsource;

5 %_eg_hidenotesandsource;

30 %let x=%str(test);

32 %put "This is a &x"abc;

NOTE: Line generated by the macro variable "X".

32 "This is a test

_______________

"This is a test"abc

NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string might change in a future SAS release. Inserting white space

between a quoted string and the succeeding identifier is recommended.

Macro quoting functions use special delta characters to mask any special characters found within the argument to the function. These delta characters can sometimes be misinterpreted in non-macro code and cause unexpected problems. The circumvention is to use the %UNQUOTE function to remove the delta characters.

%put "This is a %unquote(&x)"abc;