%IF Macro condition check with hyphen in argument

[Daniel]

Dear All,

I have a macro that checks many conditions such as these ones:

%IF %STR(&LEADER) NE %STR() %THEN %DO;

...

%IF %SYSFUNC(FILEEXIST(&PATH.\&SUPERVISOR.\&LEADER.)) %THEN %DO;

In the above, two of the arguments (SUPERVISOR and LEADER) can sometimes have hypens because they are names. When this happens, it yields the following error:

ERROR: A character operand was found in the %EVAL function or %IF condition where a numeric

       operand is required. The condition was: &LEADER NE

Is there any way around this or should I instruct users to remove hyphens when they call the macro?

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions,

Daniel

[PaigeMiller · Accepted solution]

Use the %quote function

For example &path\%quote(&supervisor)\%quote(&leader)

[Astounding]

An easy way for &LEADER would be:

%if %length(&leader) > 0 %then %do;

This could actually be abbreviated to:

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

Are you sure that &SUPERVISOR is actually causing a problem?  It looks like it should be OK.

[PaigeMiller]

A better way to check to see if a macro variable &leader is blank is:

%sysevalf(%superq(leader)=,boolean)

See http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/022-2009.pdf

This eliminates all possible problems caused by hyphens and other special characters

[Daniel]

Thank you both for your answers, everything works fine with the modifications you have proposed 🙂