Hello everyone. this is likely a very stupid question, but I cannot figure out why this is happening. Basically I have a datafile which has dates in the format YYYYMMDD  so 20130110  for October 1st 2013. If I read it in with an informat of YYMMDD8.  it works, however if I also read it in with the informat of YYMMDD10. it works. (noted a different users code doing this and I thought it was an error at first). I had always thought you needed back-slashes within your dates to allow YYMMDD10. to work with these dates. This appears to not be true, can anyone explain why this is? Interestingly enough, even if I just specify YYMMDD.  with no distinct value this works... So If I was going to read in a date that was in YYYYMMDD format, but I did not know if it was going to have back-slashes or not, wouldn't I want to always specify the YYMMDD anyways? Thanks so much! Brandon ... View more

Hello everyone. I need some help with understanding the masking of specific characters being passed into Macro's. This is actually related to a problem that Tom helped me solve the other day, however it has arisen in a seperate problem (I will use the first for simplicity). Okay, the following code does not work. the reason is the FIRST macro input has a "(" within the name, so when sas Reads the macro (in the call step) it is reading an open parenthesis, and it is thus assuming macro variable 1 and 2 are the same (since it does not find a closed parenthesis). %macro Mapping_Names(dsin,dsout);    data &dsout.;   infile "&dsin." dsd  lrecl=32000 truncover obs=1;   length varnumCSV 8 name $2000.;     input @;     do varnumCSV = 1 to countw(_infile_,',','Q');       input name @;        output;   end;   run;    %mend Mapping_names;   %Mapping_Names(tab verification(((Greengiant Population, outputdata); So basically I want to pass the entire first string (up until the comma) as a single string into sas, and I would like it to ignore the ((( values after the word Verification. This is because someone is naming files with these values (I can't change this). I also have written macro's that will open Excel files and then run the associated VBA within the Excel files (like the following) and someone named an excel with with a "(" in its title so I ran into the same error. %macro runexcel_example(excelfile,macroname); FILENAME xcel DDE "EXCEL|SYSTEM"; data _null_;      file xcel;      put "[open(""&excelfile."")]";      put "[open(""&macroname."")]";      put "[quit()]"; run; %mend runexceL_example; %runexcel_Example(I:\projects\multi(files.xlsm  ,   multi(files.xlsm!Multifiles.multifiles); Note that this macro program works for every macro we have, except for when the names have special characters (namly these parenthesis).  Is there a way to hide these values  and have sas put them directly into the file so it doesn't combine both macro varaibles into 1 variable and blow up the program? I am thinking something along the lines of the %str, or %nstr, or %quote values but I have not been able to figure this one out! Thanks! Brandon &macrovariable."")]"; ... View more