Apsotrophy with ne

[DavidPhillips2]

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?

[DavidPhillips2 · Accepted solution]

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

[RW9]

Can you not just put quotes around it?

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

Another good reason not to use macro for data processing?

[DavidPhillips2]

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.

[RW9]

 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.

[Ksharp]

%if %length(&department)  %then %do;