Question

Executing locally in a clean session:

%let x = %str(put(age, best.));

proc sql;
    select &x from sashelp.class;
quit;

This generates the following error:

1     put(age, best.)
               ----
               22
                ----
                76
ERROR 22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following: a format name, ?.

ERROR 76-322: Syntax error, statement will be ignored.

But this “manually-resolved” version runs without notes, warnings or errors:

proc sql;
    select put(age, best.) from sashelp.class;
quit;

Can somebody explain exactly what %str() is doing in this program that causes an issue at execution time? Apologies for the vague question, but I am unsure what the relevant interactions are; I cannot replicate using equivalent data-step syntax so perhaps proc SQL peculiarities are involved?

Answer 1

Answered at this question on runsubmit.com:

I’m going to mark this answer as
correct because it led me to this page
of documentation:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/mcrolref/61885/HTML/default/viewer.htm#tw3514-unquote.htm
– “In rare cases, masking text with a macro quoting function changes the way
the word scanner tokenizes the text
… The word scanner does not use it
as the boundary of a literal token in
the input stack”. Sounds like a bug,
frankly, but if the tokenizer
algorithm is as ancient and hairy as I
imagine, I’d spin it as a quirk too!