Technology Tales

Carrying colour coding across multi-line custom log messages in SAS

16th February 2022

Custom error messages are good to add to SAS macros but you can get inconsistent colouration of the message text in multi-line messages. That was something that I just overlooked until I recently came across a solution. That is to use a hyphen at the end of the ERROR/WARNING/NOTE prefix instead of the more usual colon. Any prefixes ending on a hyphen are not included in the log text and the colouration ignores the carriage return that ordinary would change the text colour to black. The simple macro below demonstrates the effect.

Macro Code:

%macro test;
%put ERROR: this is a test;
%put ERROR- this is another test;
%put WARNING: this is a test;
%put WARNING- this is another test;
%put NOTE: this is a test;
%put NOTE- this is another test;
%mend test;

%test

Log Output:

ERROR: this is a test
       this is another test

WARNING: this is a test
         this is another test

NOTE: this is a test
      this is another test