Taking substring from the name of the variable macro

[Abud]

Hi all,

I'd like to now if is it possible take a substr from the variable macro's name.

Something like that:

%let Test = 0

Now, I'd like to do a substr from the name "Test", Is it possible ?

Tk's in advanced!

[Jagadishkatam · Accepted solution]

Hi,

you can use the substr function to extract the part of the string. however when you use the sas function in macro variable we should use %sysfunc(). like below

%let test=%str(good day);

%put &test;

%let first=%sysfunc(substr(&test,1,4));

%put &first;

However for your question as per the post you should change the code this way

%let test=0;

%put &test;

%let first=%sysfunc(substr(&test,1,1));

%put &first;

Thanks,

Jagadish

[Reeza]

You can substring the variable name, but you'd need to know it before hand.

%let test=0;

%put &test;

%let first=%sysfunc(substr(test,1,1));

%put &first;

If you're looking to substring the value of your macro variable then Jagadish's solution will work.

[Ron_MacroMaven]

Yes, the macro language has a %substr function.

%Let Mvar = value;

%Let part = %substr(&Mvar,1,2);

%put note: part: &Part.;

note: part: va

The way I read your Q you want to get a substring of a macro variable name;

that does not compute. What could you do with that info?

Ron Fehd  macro maven

[Haikuo]

Hi, This could be completely off-topic without knowing your purpose. But SAS stores all of the Macro variable name in : dictionary.macros (only for sql) or sashelp.vmacro. From there you can just treat them as regular text strings and apply many powerful parsing functions.

Haikuo