Can you provide more about what question you are trying to answer?
For learning purposes or just to check on stuff you might want to use
%put _user_;
as short code to display all the macro variable names and the values. In this case I see:
32 %PUT _user_ ;
GLOBAL OUT1 5
GLOBAL OUT2 7
GLOBAL OUT3 3
The use of the macro variables would depend on what you need a count of values for since that is what these have. Since the approach the code took to get the counts you can't tell which of the ID values they were associated with. I would think for any real use you would want the ID somewhere, likely in another macro variable list like Id1 Id2 Id3.
data test2;
retain num_rows num_vals 0;
set test1;
BY ID;
if first.ID then num_rows=0;
num_rows=num_rows+1;
if last.ID then do;
num_vals=num_vals+1;
call symput('OUT'|| strip(put(num_vals,6.0)),strip(put(num_rows,6.0)));
call symput('ID'||strip(put(num_vals,6.0)),Id);
output;
end;
run;
You could use this to select records based on the Id and display or use the count. A not very complex example with some bad characteristics:
/* compile a macro that can use
the created macro variables
*/
%macro dummy ();
%do i=1 %to 3;
data work.id_&&id&i.;
set work.test0;
where id="&&id&i.";
ratio = x / &&out&i. ;
run;
%end;
%mend;
/* call the macro*/
%dummy()
Which creates subsets of the original data (likely not a good idea many times), uses the macro variables in an indirect reference to use the values of the just created Id macro variables to select the values in the Where statement and to create data set names using the text of the ID. Then uses the count values to calculate something.
Where is this not good? Use in the macro of macro variables that you may not know where they came from. A fixed count in the I=1 %to 3 (what if only two values are assigned, or the original data had 4 or 9 Ids?). The indirect references can be a bit tricky to work with. We also assumed the values of ID contained characters that would result in a valid data set name (special characters, spaces or long values of the original ID could cause errors or warnings).
If you created a variable that had the count of Ids, 3 in this case, you could use that as a parameter to eliminate the Do loop issue by passing it as a parameter in the macro:
%macro dummy (limit=);
%do i=1 %to &limit.;
data work.id_&&id&i.;
set work.test0;
where id="&&id&i.";
ratio = x / &&out&i. ;
run;
%end;
%mend;
/* call the macro*/
%dummy(limit=3)
But one of the critical components of programming with macro variables and macro coding: Start with code that does what you want without any macro variables or coding and then add the parts to use the macros. Not start with macro coding and figure out how to use it.
