About Peter_L

Peter_L · ‎11-17-2022

Your EXE file is running under Windows command CMD shell. You can redirect to the input of terminal-style programs like this: echo R|"P:\SAS PD\LEGS\G3\LEGS Release.exe" Echo sends R followed by end-of-line. It is more challenging to provide two lines. It might work to write your two lines to an external file and then have this CMD line: <"myinput.txt" "P:\SAS PD\LEGS\G3\LEGS Release.exe" It depends very much on how the EXE reads its input. In the worst case you might need something like AutoIT. Get it working outside SAS first, then make SAS provide what works. Ref: Command Redirection, Pipes - Windows CMD - SS64.com An alternative is to write a CMD wrapper for your EXE which takes two parameters and provides them as described above. Then call the wrapper from SAS. Ref: Call - Windows CMD - SS64.com

Peter_L · ‎03-15-2022

Use SQL. It is far easier than the data step for such things. Use SELECT FROM and JOIN ON to do the work of MERGE if you want side-by-side columns or to select rows in one table based on rows in another. If you want stacked columns you might need also to use SELECT UNION later. I can't comment more as the question is not well enough defined (see other replies).

Peter_L · ‎03-15-2022

As you are going to have to change the filename statement code according to the other replies here, had you thought of encapsulating your filename FTP statement as a macro? This will give you one place in the future to deal with changes to the external environment, which in my experience are inevitable. It is defensive programming. If you do this, use keyword parameters, not positional: they are clearer, more reliable and more defensive.

Peter_L · ‎03-15-2022

I tried UltraEdit but found I preferred jEdit. It has more intelligent highlighting, particularly for HTML with embedded CSS or javascript. It works well for SAS. If you embed other languages in SAS, you can use its delegation mechanism to highlight them correctly. The main reason I use a separate editor is to search and replace in multiple files. The SAS editor deals with only one file at a time. jEdit also has an excellent side-by-side file difference plugin.

Peter_L · ‎03-27-2020

Do you use an automated process for generating the PDFs (and web pages) from the source documents? If so, everything should be kept up to date automatically. We use some software to generate our help which has this capability, although we don't use the automation.

Peter_L · ‎03-17-2020

As a general solution to this and other problems with editors, could SAS publish the EBNF language definition for all SAS languages, as is routinely done for public standards such as SQL? From that it would be possible to derive highlighting, completion and editing rules for any editor, although there might still be a lot of work, depending on how close the editor syntax definition language is to EBNF. Even SAS's own products do not always recognize its own syntax, so maybe the language(s) is/are not context-free grammars.

Peter_L · ‎03-13-2020

SAS Support has determined that this problem is an interaction with the encoding. When SAS is running with UTF-8 encoding the SVG file also has UTF-8 encoding and the problem does not arise. In wlatin1 encoding the SVG file causes some browser parsers to fail. I use wlatin1 encoding because UTF-8 does not work for me owing to an incompatibility between SAS and the ODBC driver for SAP SQL Anywhere in UTF-8 mode related to the width of character columns. This has gone via SAS Support to the engineering queue.

Peter_L · ‎03-12-2020

Yes, I have informed SAS support. This is the fastest way to inform fellow sufferers.

Peter_L · ‎03-12-2020

In SAS 9.4M5 in Windows 10 64-bit the following gives unparsable SVG graphics: options colophon="© Company"; ods html5 device=svg options(svg_mode='img'); /* some graphics output */ What you find in the *.svg file is a line like this between desc and defs (line 4):  In the HTML page which refers to this you may see a broken link symbol or nothing. If you open the SVG file in a browser you may see nothing. If you are lucky (e.g. using Firefox) you will see a parse error message. I have not tried this with embedded SVG because I need a separate img file. A workaround is to replace the copyright symbol © with plain ASCII (c) or the word "copyright". @Sas Please could you fix this minor bug which is very difficult to diagnose.

Peter_L · ‎06-17-2019

Thanks for investigating this. I had realised that the image could go on a separate line. My use case requires it on the same line as the text.

Peter_L · ‎06-14-2019

I want a footnote in my output with a left-aligned long text string and a small right-aligned image. I can do this with the following code: ods escapechar='^'; footnote1 "Very long text which wraps half-way across the page because of a design error" justify=right "^{style [postimage='image.png']}"; This works the same in both HTML and PDF. The text wraps half-way across the page. It looks something like this: Very long text which wraps half-way across the page because of a [image] design error On inspecting the HTML I can see that SAS generates a table with two cells in this case. The widths are fixed at 50% each. In my view this is a design error. The widths should adapt to the contents with the auto table layout algorithm of CSS. A better solution would be to implement the separately aligned text strings with HTML SPAN elements and CSS style text-align, which can be left, center and right. Exactly the same applies to a title as it is also a table. I have tried to work around this with no success. In HTML with CSS it is trivially simple to make an image or inline text float right. As I want this to work in HTML and PDF I have to use SAS's complex ODS. Has anyone found a way to make ODS float an image right in a footnote without causing the footnote to be split into two table cells? Version: SAS 9.4M5 64-bit on Windows 10.

Peter_L · ‎07-09-2018

Thanks. I have been discussing this with Technical support for some time. They confirm that the issue is with byte alignment but they haven't seen it with other ODBC drivers. Alignment is a known problem: Microsoft describe it in some detail. There is a work-around: use the DBSASTYPE dataset option to specify the width for every column. This is extremely tedious. The problem is being discussed with SAS R&D.

Peter_L · ‎07-09-2018

Thanks for the tips on multi-lingual computing. The database uses utf-8: that's why I want to use it in SAS. There's the problem: it doesn't work for tables with one or more text columns of an odd (not even) width.

Peter_L · ‎07-02-2018

I have a strange problem which I have been discussing for some time with SAS support. Now we are playing Support Ping-Pong. They say it is the driver but it works for other applications, including R. Has anyone else seen this? I have SAS 9.4M5 64-bit on Windows 10 (64-bit Intel) connecting via ODBC (64-bit of course) to SAP SQL Anywhere. SAS is using utf-8 encoding. I can connect and read the table schemas (oddly with lengths 3x database column width). I can read tables with only numeric columns. I can read tables with some text columns of even width. Any tables which contain even one text column with an odd width: 1, 3, 5 characters etc. throw an ODBC error: ERROR: CLI column bind error: [SAP][ODBC Driver]Invalid string or buffer length. My investigation indicates that this is a well-known problem in ODBC caused by the buffer memory for the columns not being aligned according to the processor architecture restrictions, which would be on a 2 or 4 byte boundary. It is possible that the SAP SQL Anywhere driver implements (for portability reasons) a stricter alignment rule than other manufacturers' ODBC drivers. Interestingly, this occurs only when SAS uses utf-8 encoding, not in Wlatin1. That would mean that the ODBC driver is in UNICODE wide mode. I want to join the rest of the world in using Unicode so I can display international characters from our database, including Polish and Cyrillic, which are not in Wlatin1. Has anyone else seen this? Alternatively, has anyone proof that the scenario I describe above works for other ODBC drivers? Thanks. Peter Lancashire

Peter_L · ‎11-22-2017

I use most of the methods mentioned by other contributors plus a few others. . Break code into cohesive sections. Make the sections have as low a coupling as possible. Use macro variables to parameterise code. There is a downside: too many global variables (= coupling). . Save code as "modules" and %include them as needed. Write pre- and post- assertions for each module formally to define what it does. Include the unit test code with every module commented out at the end. . I write the documentation in the code marked with special comment symbols of /** or **; A simple awk script then processes these into html in a similar way to javadoc. . Replace as much DATA step merge code with PROC SQL as possible. It makes the code shorter and easier to read. Use data-driven methods as much as possible. This tends to make things simpler, shorter, more reliable and easier to test. SQL helps here. Replace macro logic with DATA step logic and data-driven methods. DATA step logic is far easier to debug and quoting is not a problem. . To make your code easier to read change the editor to show a light grey background to comments. The colour extends to the screen width. Then use comments to break up sections of code. You will be surprised how big a difference it makes.

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