Unmatched quotation mark issue in SAS

Question

As is known to all, SAS needs special care to quotation marks inside a sentence.

E.g.

%let quoted="I'd like to";
data temp;
    set temp;
    quoted="&quoted";
run;

error is encounterred when submitting.

In fact I need to copy data to one dataset from another one, in which there are a lot of records containing quotation marks. When assigning, error occurrs and data step stop executing, causing rest of the code to be invalid. So in this case, it's impossible to modify original data set by adding duplicated quotation marks, which doesn't make sense.

So instead of having to add a duplicated one, like, "I''d like to", is there any other way of avoiding the error, or making data step keeping executing?

Thanks,

Answer 1

When using the macro language (including the %let command) you do not want to use quotes to identify text strings. To place a single quote in a string you must use one of the macro utility masking functions such as %str(). The correct syntax to place a single unmatched quote in a macro variable using %let is shown below. The % symbol before the single quote is an escape character to tell SAS that the following character (a single quote) should be used as a literal. Also note that I've removed the double quotes from the %let as they are not required.

%let quoted=%str(I%'d like to);
data temp;    
    quoted="&quoted";
run;

Cheers Rob

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve in the actual situation, but in the above situation it can be solved removing the double quotation marks in the data step.

%let quoted="I'd like to";
data temp;
    set temp;
    quoted=&quoted;
run;