SAS and Curl: 'env' in url causes error

Question

I\'m trying to use CURL with SAS 9.3. I got it working for normal webpages. However, when I try to use it with a URL with \'env\', I get the following error message: \'env\' i

Answer 1

Yes I've hit this issue before and it took a while to figure out.

It turns out that you need to use a caret ^ to mask any ampsersand & characters whenever you process it through the command line pipe. Looking back at it now I have no idea how I figured it out...

Also - you need to use a lowercase -k I believe.

I cleaned it up a little and this worked fine for me:

%let query= %sysfunc(urlencode(SELECT * FROM yahoo.finance.option_contract WHERE symbol='YHOO'));
%let env  = %sysfunc(urlencode(store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys));
%let url  = https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=&query^%nrstr(&)diagnostics=true^%nrstr(&)env=&env;

filename curl pipe "d:\sasdev\common\bin\curl\curl.exe -k &url 2>&1";

data _null_;
  infile curl lrecl=32767;
  input;
  put _infile_;
run;

Note that you'll want to change the path to curl.

Answer 2

I would try adding quotes that will get passed to Windows.

Something like

"curl -k ""&url."" 2>&1"

The doubled double quotes are passesd as a single " character to Windows.