topic Re: Comments inside macro %IF statements? in SAS Enterprise Guide

Comments inside macro %IF statements?

JBerry — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 23:42:18 GMT

I am writing a macro with a rather complicated IF statement - however I noticed when I put comments inside I get this annoying error:

ERROR: There is no matching %IF statement for the %ELSE.

I really dont have the option to *not* write comments, is there some other way I can do this?

%global testvar;
%global check;
%let testvar=5;

%MACRO printme(check);

%IF &testvar=1 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=2 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=3 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=4 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=5 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=6 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=7 %THEN
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE %IF &testvar=8 %THEN 
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 
* comment ;
%ELSE
%DO; 
%let check = 1; 
%put testvar is &testvar and check was &check; 
%END; 

%MEND printme;
%printme;

Re: Comments inside macro %IF statements?

Reeza — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 23:44:34 GMT

Macro commenting

%*this is my comment;

Re: Comments inside macro %IF statements?

RW9 — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 10:08:28 GMT

Hi,

I have to ask, why are you doing that in macro? It seems like a large amount of difficult to read, and hard to maintain code, for no apparent benefit. Use SAS Base - which is designed to process and manipulate data for data processing and manipulation. Macro is for generating repetitive code, it is not for data processing and manipulation:

%let testvar=5;
data _null_;
  if &testvar. in (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) then call symputx('check',1);
run;
%put testvar. is &testvar. and check was &check.;

Re: Comments inside macro %IF statements?

JBerry — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 16:57:42 GMT

Thanks, but this was just a simplified made-up example to illustrate my problem.

In reality, what I'm doing involves many macros passing variables back and forth and doing a variety of data tasks, so its quite complicated to post here.