Mindy ,

You have used a form of commenting text that is less than optimal. You should use /* */ It doesnt get compiled like * ABC ; does. Now what implication does that have to your question well you have a comment with a unmatch single quote in it. Since it is compiled it SAS sees the single quote and wants another one. It cant find one so every thing including your %Mend statement is seen as part of a quoted text.

So yank the single quote out or changeyour comments to /* */.

Better yet why are you doing this why not do something like:

Data Need ; If _N_ = 0 Then Call Missing( C , D ) ; Set Test ; Run ;

It will set the variables C and D to missing and if they exist it wont do a thing if they dont exist they will be created. The one thing you will have to watch is if C and/or D is a character value. Which means you have to define their length before the If statement.

Toby Dunn

If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway. Murphys Law #2.

The buddy system is essential to your survival; it gives the enemy somebody else to shoot at. Murphys Law #

Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure. Murphys Law #9

From: Mindy <master2005_sas@YAHOO.COM> Reply-To: Mindy <master2005_sas@YAHOO.COM> To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: macro scope Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:18:08 -0700

Hey, Guys,

I have two sas codes as below. The first one gave the results I expected, and the second one gave me the warning as "missing %mend statement." The only difference of these two codes are the start point of a macro. I couldn't figure out why the second code doesn't work. Could someone give a highlight of the problem? Thanks a lot.

(1) program source code options mlogic mprint symbolgen; data test; input a b; cards; 1 2 3 4 ; run; *** check if variable c and d exist in dataset test; data _null_; dsid=open("test"); check1=varnum(dsid, 'c'); check2=varnum(dsid, 'd'); if check1=0 then call symput('ex_c','0'); if check2=0 then call symput('ex_d','0'); run; *** resign variable c and d to missing if they don't exist in dataset test; %macro try; data test; set test; %if &ex_c=0 %then c=.;; %if &ex_d=0 %then d=.;; run; %mend try; %try proc print data=test; run;

************************ Program output is ,

The SAS System 14:01 Thursday, June 28, 2007 1

Obs a b c d

1 1 2 . . 2 3 4 . .

(2) Program source code options mlogic mprint symbolgen; data test; input a b; cards; 1 2 3 4 ; run; *** check if variable c and d exist in dataset test; %macro try; data _null_; dsid=open("test"); check1=varnum(dsid, 'c'); check2=varnum(dsid, 'd'); if check1=0 then call symput('ex_c','0'); if check2=0 then call symput('ex_d','0'); run; *** resign variable c and d to missing if they don't exist in dataset test; data test; set test; %if &ex_c=0 %then c=.;; %if &ex_d=0 %then d=.;; run; %mend try; %try proc print data=test; run;

******program log, WARNING: Missing %MEND statement

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