topic String concatenation in SAS Procedures

String concatenation

garag — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:56:56 GMT

Hi,

I need to concatenate some strings in order to create a command. This is the intial code

filename comando pipe "cd mylogdir; find . -mtime +1 -name '*.log'";

data listafile;
   infile comando truncover;
   input @1 nomefile $200.;
   if index(nomefile,'.log') or index(nomefile,'too long') then output;
run;

filename comando;

I would create the command

"cd mylogdir; find . -mtime +1 -name '*.log'";

dinamically, I mean a would read each parts of it from a dataset and concatenate them in order to create the complete command. Here you are my code

data dat;
a='cd ';
b='mylogdir';
c='find . -mtime +1 -name *.log';
old=a || b || c;
put old=;
run;

%let mystring=;

data _null_;
set dat;
call symput('mystring',old);
run;

put mystring;

filename comando pipe &mystring;

but it does not work. Someone has an idea?

Many thanks

Tom — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:01:02 GMT

I see three issues.

1) You left out the semi-colon seperator between the cd and find commands.

old = a || b || ';' || c;

2) You have not put the quotes in the find command.

c="find . -mtime +1 -name '*.log'";

3) You need to quote the string you use in the FILENAME statement.

filename comando pipe "&mystring";

or you could use the quote() function.

call symput('mystring',quote(trim(old)));

garag — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:29:01 GMT

Thanks Tom, it worked.