topic Re: Wrong answer generated using %sysevalf in SAS Studio

Wrong answer generated using %sysevalf

ssll — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:01:13 GMT

Hi there,

I have entered the following 2 sets of codes, even though sas log says there is no syntax error but sas has generated the wrong output for both set of codes(both sets of codes shown below were pasted from sas log ). Can you please point out my mistake? Or is there a glitch in sas? Any help or any comment is highly appreciated. Thanks a lot for your help!

first set of codes:

71 %let today = %sysfunc(today(), date9.);

72 %put &today;

21SEP2025

73 %let Ichoose = %sysfunc(putn('01Nov2025'd, date9.));

74 %put &Ichoose;

01NOV2025

75 %if %sysevalf(&today < &Ichoose) %then %do ;

76 %put abcd;

77 %end;

78 %else %do;

79 %put efgh ;

efgh

80 %end;

second set of codes:

69 %let today = %sysfunc(today(), date9.);

70 %put &today;

21SEP2025

71 %let Ichoose = %sysfunc(putn('01Nov2025'd, date9.));

72 %put &Ichoose;

01NOV2025

73 %if %sysevalf(&today > &Ichoose) %then %do ;

74 %put abcd;

abcd

75 %end;

76 %else %do;

77 %put efgh ;

78 %end;

Re: Wrong answer generated using %sysevalf

Tom — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:14:40 GMT

Looks right to me.

The string 01NOV2025 is definitely less than the string 21SEP2025 since the digit 0 is less than the digit 2.

If you wanted to compare two dates you could either remove the formatting when generating the macro variables.

%let today = %sysfunc(today());
%let Ichoose = %sysevalf('01Nov2025'd);

Then your comparison would be comparing two digit strings so %SYSEVALF() would treat them as numbers.

Or leave the macro variables the same and instead convert the values to date literals when doing the comparison.

%if %sysevalf("&today"d < "&Ichoose"d) %then %do ;

Re: Wrong answer generated using %sysevalf

ssll — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:48:56 GMT

Hi Tom, I just tried both of your suggestions in sas, and I got the correct answer . You solved my problem, thanks so very much!