topic Apsotrophy with ne in SAS Procedures

Apsotrophy with ne

DavidPhillips2 — Tue, 22 May 2018 13:23:40 GMT

When department has the value of Dean's Office. The below errors

%if &department ne %then %do;

ERROR: A character operand was found in the %EVAL function or %IF condition where a numeric operand is required. The condition was: &department ne
ERROR: The macro DEPARTMENTWHERE will stop executing.

What can I use to allow the if statement to work?

Re: Apsotrophy with ne

DavidPhillips2 — Tue, 22 May 2018 13:36:14 GMT

%if %bquote(&department) ne %then %do;

Re: Apsotrophy with ne

RW9 — Tue, 22 May 2018 13:37:27 GMT

Can you not just put quotes around it?

%if "&department." ne "" %then %do;

Another good reason not to use macro for data processing?

Re: Apsotrophy with ne

Ksharp — Tue, 22 May 2018 13:42:48 GMT

%if %length(&department) %then %do;

Re: Apsotrophy with ne

DavidPhillips2 — Tue, 22 May 2018 13:50:41 GMT

What is the difference between '' and "" here?

I think a the use of most functions around the parameter work work in this case. I need the macro to print out a dynamic report.

Re: Apsotrophy with ne

RW9 — Tue, 22 May 2018 13:58:09 GMT

Has to be double quotes for the macro variable to resolve. Also, if you used single quotes it would be unbalanced. Just think about what is resolved:

%if "Dean's Office" ne "" %then %do;

"I need the macro to print out a dynamic report." - the point is? Many simple methods, categorise the data using numerics rather than text, use by group processing, combine categorisation and by group processing, generate code from datastep. Reason I ask is that as soon as you fix the code to handle ', you can almost guarentee that the next run will include a ", or some other strange character. Datasets can handle this fine, macro is really not good at data processing.