Technology Tales

%sysfunc and missing spaces

10th June 2009

Recently, I was trying something like this and noted some odd behaviour:

data _null_;
file fileref;
put "text %sysfunc(pathname(work)) more text";
run;

This is the kind of thing that I was getting:

text c:\sasworkmore text

In other words, the space after %sysfunc was being ignored and, since I was creating and executing a Windows batch file using SAS 8.2, the command line action wasn’t doing what was expected. The fix was simple but I reckoned that I’d share what I saw anyway, in case it helped anyone else:

data _null_;
file fileref;
x="text %sysfunc(pathname(work))"||" more text";
put x;
run;