How to Reference Sas Variable with Cats in Proc Sql?
Very Basic Thing I Can't Seem to Figure Out. Columns in a Particular Table Are Numbers with Underscores in Front of Them, I Have a Number Stored in a Macro...
Very basic thing I can't seem to figure out. Columns in a particular table are numbers with underscores in front of them, I have a number stored in a macro variable and the name of the column I want to use is that number with an underscore. Say the number is 9, when I write the following code I get a column where each observation is _9 rather than column _9 from that dataset.
proc sql;
create table TM1 as
select cats("_",&rat_as_num) from default_data;
quit;
1 Answer
CATS returns a string, not a variable name. So the variable name will not matter, you get a string with _RAT_AS_NUM_VALUE.
To return a variable name use %SYSFUNC() instead,
data test;
_9 = 4;
run;
%let rat_as_num=9;
proc sql;
create table test2 as
select %sysfunc(cats(_, &rat_as_num)) from test;
quit;
proc print data=test2;
run;
Per @Richards comments this also works:
proc sql;
create table test2 as
select _&rat_as_nun from test;
quit;
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