Have several programs that have the same date variable changing each quarter.. Wrote the code at the start of the program to change the one date variable each quarter - code runs once a quarter.   data null; %global qstart ; %global qtr_numb;            qstart = intnx('quarter',date(),-0);                         */first day of quarter. qtr_numb =compress("QTR" || qtr(intnx('quarter',date(),-0))); */ this quarter format qstart date9.;  put qstart; put qtr_numb;  run; 01JUL2025    */correct result. QTR3              */correct result   All good.  First variable is date, second variable is a concatenation of the string "QTR" and the numeric value of the quarter.  No thought at all went into the design of the data sets, instead of one variable with the results for eacg quarter, they of course, made four distinct variables = QTR1, QTR2, QTR3, QTR4.  That's not too bad, but there are data sets with 40 variables, 20 of them are one variable repeated 20 times.  Data sets are unnaturally long.   data BASE  (keep = GROUP accountID  &QTR_numb. );     set based; Run;   When I place the variable &qtr_numb in a KEEP statement as above I get the following error:     compress("QTR" || qtr(intnx('quarter',date(),-0))) ERROR 214-322: Variable name ( is not valid. ERROR 22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following: a name, a quoted string, /, ;, _DATA_, _LAST_, _NULL_. ERROR 23-7: Invalid value for the KEEP option. ERROR 200-322: The symbol is not recognized and will be ignored. ----- --------- - 23 23 22 ERROR 22-7: Invalid option name ,. 1 ! compress("QTR" || qtr(intnx('quarter',date(),-0))) ----- 214 ERROR 214-322: Variable name "QTR" is not valid.   Why is SAS interpreting the variable assignment as a literal string?   The first variable above - an actual day, DID originally work in a simple data step like below, but no longer works:   data SAMP ; set VAMP; where sampdate ge &Qstart. ; run;    LOG: ERROR 22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following: a name, a quoted string, a numeric constant, a datetime constant, a missing value, INPUT, PUT. ERROR 76-322: Syntax error, statement will be ignored. ERROR: Syntax error while parsing WHERE clause. 43 where sampdate ge &Qstart. ; - 22 76   Are there supposed to be double ampersands, triple?   I will need to use one or more of the two variables in Where clause in data steps. Keep/Drop  statements PROC SQL. Thanks. ... View more

Have two servers - PROD & TEST.  I often flip between developing on TEST, and running production code on PROD on PC SAS 9.4 Signon is done at the top of the code as below.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            OPTIONS netencralg=SASProprietary;                                                                                                                                               OPTIONS COMAMID= tcp remote                                                                                                                                                                                     Enter my credentials  - same for PROD and TEST                                                                                                                I can alter data all day long on TEST, but not PROD, of course. Should I mix those two up, that would a problem.  Lib names are exactly the same for both. I decided to write a short macro and place it in the SAS startup directory. thinking I would run the macro before any long code that updates data sets.                                                                                                                                                    %macro server; %if &mynode = 'longstringofletters_numbers' %then %put ' TEST Server'; %else %put ' PROD Server'; %mend;   I use %put &mynode, which displays the server name.  I then cut-and-paste that into the macro. Result always defaults to PROD, even though the string for the server is TEST.                                                                                                                                                                                  I tried to use like instead of "=", but I get the following error:  A character operand was found in the %EVAL function or %IF condition where a numeric operand is required.   There are no special characters in server name.  Used the "%" in the beginning and end of the server name, did not  help. Where did I go wrong?   ... View more

Have an output table from a proc transpose with about 1000 records, 20 variables. Data contained is a "1" or "." (null).   Would like to concatenate all variable names with a "1' value into a new, separate field, (building an array of column names and using catx, I suppose), on each row so I have a list in this new, separate field (in the same row, separated by a ",") of "field1, field7, field10, field 14", etc.   - IF  those fields on that row have a "1" value.  Of the twenty variables, the most I've seen is  five with a "1" value, so it's not a long string.  90% of the rows have only one occurrence that is not null.     This is similar to the Excel index/match function which returns the column header in a matrix of data (not the cell address such as A, B,, AB, AC, AD, etc.), if that helps.    Thanx. ... View more

Added a new field to an existing FSEDIT frame. The only responses are "Y/N".  The variable capturing this response is a 1 char. How do I restrict responses to  just "Y/N"? Is it done via code in the SCL, or by limiting the responses in the variable itself, like in other databases?   THX. ... View more

Creating a macro to first select all column_names from a data set  into a list "dcodes",  then cycle through column_names, and if the column_name starts with "Diagnosiscode" (three such columns - Diagnosiscode1, Diagnosiscode2, Diagnosiscode3) apply simple logic based on the CONTENTS of the variable.  If the contents of var Diagnosiscode1 is between the string "DC_101" and "DX_900" then perform some action (add a flag to another, different variable not in the :dcodes list  - ("DX_GP01").   The log below clearly shows macro variable DIAG resolves to diagnosiscode1, yet the mlogic resolves to false.                                                                                                                                                                                  When  DIAG resolves to "Diagnosiscode1", or "Diagnosiscode2" or "Diagnosiscode3", the next step will fail -line 11 - (logically),  as the string "Diagnosiscode1" is of course, NOT                                                                         ge 'DX_515' and le 'DX_910'.   What I want is to assign DIAG to the CONTENTS of the variable "Diagnosiscode1" in data set Medical, so the logic would work if the data in that variable was in fact, ge 'DX_515' and le 'DX_910'.                                                                                                                                                  So there are two issues:                                                                                                                                                     1.  Why doesn't the logic in line 10 work  the attached log. 2.  Once the logic does work, how to change macro variable DIAG from line 8 so the CONTENTS of  the name of that variable can be scanned for certain conditions, and if true, apply the logic to another variable.                                                                                                                                                                             A simpler way would be to just loop through the variables Diagnosiscode1, Diagnosiscode2 & Diagnosiscode3,  one row at a time, and modify the contents of a second variable based on what was found.                                                                                                                                                                                    There are many examples of looping through a SAS data set here, but the the output is always to another data set.  I want to change values in the same data set.                                                                                                     THX.   1 %macro sum_flg(); 2 data med_grp; 3 length dx_GP01 2.; 4 set medical; 5 %local i diag; 6 %let i=1; 7 %do %while (%scan(&dcodes, &i) ne ); 8 %let diag = %scan(&dcodes, &i); 9 %put &diag.; 10 %if &diag. = ('diagnosiscode%') %then %do; 11 %if &diag. ge 'DX_515' and &diag. LE 'DX_910' %then %let Dx_GP01 = '1'; 12 %ELSE Dx_GP01 = '0'; 13 %end; 14 %let i = %eval(&i + 1); 15 %end; 16 %mend sum_flg           SYMBOLGEN: Macro variable DIAG resolves to diagnosiscode1 MLOGIC(SUM_FLG): %IF condition &diag. = ('diagnosiscode%') is FALSE     ... View more

Have 60 or so files in UNIX server, some are csv, some are txt, some are xlsx.                                                                                              Vendors have agreed to place date of file the last eight characters of file name, just before extension.   These files cannot be opened, modified or changed in any way as they are not on our servers.   Code below extracts the eight characters correctly.                                                                                                                                                   data filenames; length fref $8 f_name $52; did = filename(fref,'/big_long_path_name/'); did = dopen(fref); do i = 1 to dnum(did); f_name = dread(did,i); output; end; did = dclose(did); did = filename(fref); keep f_name; run;   /*Now need that string to be saved as a variable so I can append it do the final SAS .sas7bdat data sets such as                                     "big_gnarly_data_10_31_22.sas7bdat"   data null; length dstring $8.; set filenames; dstring = substr(F_name,length(F_name)-12,8); %put &dstring.; run; Dstring is is in fact a variable with the correct date of the file in the Unix directory.                                                                                    But %put &dstring. literally displays "substr(F_name,length(F_name)-12,8)".                                                                                          This is not helpful, as I need to append this variable again and again for each final data set.   THX. ... View more