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=\         


        

Answer 1

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;

Answer 2

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