topic Macro within a macro in SAS Studio

Macro within a macro

Annalena — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 21:34:01 GMT

Hello,

I coded a macro which I then invoked in a second macro like this:

%macro evtstudy(industry,start,end,number);

/*....*/ 

%mend evtstudy;

/*Evoke event study macro for different industries and event windows*/
%macro evtrun (industry);
	%evtstudy (&industry.,-2,3,1);	
%mend evtrun;

%evtrun(aerodef);
run;

Before I changed it into a macro everything worked fine but now I always get the error

 485: ROW and COLUMN could not be determined.
 NOTE: NOSPOOL is on. Rerunning with OPTION SPOOL might allow recovery of the LINE and COLUMN where the error has occurred.

I wonder if it is because how I invoked the macro inside the other macro?

Re: Macro within a macro

Quentin — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:15:19 GMT

Invoking a macro within another macro is fine, and often a good idea. That sort of message is hard to debug, but the problem should be somewhere within your code (could be missing semicolon sometimes?).

Below example code runs fine:

%macro evtstudy(industry,start,end,number);
  %put macro EVTSTUDY running &=industry &=start &=end &=number  ;
%mend evtstudy;

%macro evtrun (industry);
  %put macro EVTRUN running &=industry ;
	%evtstudy (&industry.,-2,3,1);	
%mend evtrun;

%evtrun(aerodef)

Logs is:

34   %evtrun(aerodef)
macro EVTRUN running INDUSTRY=aerodef
macro EVTSTUDY running INDUSTRY=aerodef START=-2 END=3 NUMBER=1

Re: Macro within a macro

WarrenKuhfeld — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:17:09 GMT

Calling a macro from another macro is not a problem. I do it all the time. You must be doing something else wrong.

OPTIONS MPRINT;

and lots of other debugging options can help you debug.

Re: Macro within a macro

novinosrin — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:24:25 GMT

Try running again after turning on SPOOL option

OPTIONS SPOOL;

Re: Macro within a macro

SASKiwi — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:52:51 GMT

I reckon it might be the use of comment strings like /*----*/ in the macro causing issues. Change to the macro comment style: %*------;

Re: Macro within a macro

WarrenKuhfeld — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 22:54:34 GMT

Actually, /* */ comments are fine in a macro. I use them all the time.

Re: Macro within a macro

Annalena — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 23:03:29 GMT

Hey everybody, thank you for your answers!
It was actually a way simpler problem. Im invoking this macro for about 100 data sets, but had forgotten one of them in the import macro.. obviously SAS can't compute anything then.. I didn't see this before because SAS Studio didn't show the whole log.

Sorry, Im still a beginner.