count all character

[luca87]

Hi,

I defined a macrovariable:

%let InDomainWhere=>"30DEC2021"D;

and I need in a %if condition to count how many characters are present, how can I do that?

I was currently using

%if %eval(%sysfunc(count(%cmpress(&InDomainWhere.),%str( )))+0) = 0 %then %do;

but I realized that it only counts spaces and not all characters.

How can I do this?

Thanks

Luca

[PaigeMiller · Accepted solution]

Count how many characters are present: use the %length() macro function.

%if %length(&indomainwhere)=0 %then %do;

or if necessary

%if %length(%cmpres(&indomainwhere)) %then %do;

but if &indomainwhere is a date, I don't see why you would need %cmpres

[Tom]

You can use the %LENGTH() function to count the number of BYTES, which in a single byte encoding is the same thing.

If the string in the macro variable could contain UTF-8 characters then you will need to use the KLENGTH() function to count the number of CHARACTERS.

994   %let InDomainWhere=>"30DEC2021"D;
995   %let bytes=%length(&indomainwhere);
996   %let chars=%sysfunc(klength(%superq(indomainwhere)));
997   %put &=bytes &=chars;
BYTES=13 CHARS=13