why you can't use a macro funcation like %scan inside of a data step

[Peter_C]

If you want to use macro variable A then it must be prefixed with &
Your code is referring to data variable A

[gyambqt]

Yeah I fixed the code now. But it still didn't work

[Peter_C]

The base SAS language provides two stages for processing
1 deriving syntax (called macro language processing)
2 processing data in the data step iteration (or running a procedure like FREQ)
There is no need to make the functionality of one of these "stages", do both jobs.

[Peter_C]

did you try

%let a = a_b;
data a;
a= "%scan(&a,2,_)" ;
run;

[gyambqt]

Yeah but the % inside of double quotation won't get processed properly.

[Kurt_Bremser]

---

@gyambqt wrote:

Yeah but the % inside of double quotation won't get processed properly.

---

Nonsense. Double quotes are exactly what's needed to resolve macro triggers:

%let a=%str(a_b); /* is equivalent to %let a=a_b; */

data a;
a = "%scan(&a,2,_)";
run;

proc print data=a;
run;

Dataset a contains the value "b" in variable a.

[gyambqt]

Hmm is a="%scan(&a,2_)" equivlent to a= "'"||%scan(&a,2,_)||"'"