You aren’t supposed to use this in your data. You know this. You did it anyway. You don’t want to change your data, so you asked me to make it work.
Okay. Fine.
Today I managed to figure out something that has been bugging me for a while. I have this huge automated SAS job that reads data from a Sybase database into a dedicated SAS grid, massages it and spits out an Excel report. It has inconsistently given the following error:
"Apparent symbolic reference I not resolved."
The client’s acronym is 2 letters, separated by an ampersand, the last letter being I. They’ve put this into most, but not all, of the titles.
This creates the error above, but since I is not an actual variable in the program it carries on. The data is processed, output is created, no problems other than the warnings.
I don’t like warnings. This is fine as long as nobody ever changes the program to include the variable I.
They said that they could live with the warnings and would let the team know to expect them, and why.
My fix is to actually create the variable I and give it the value ‘&&I’, which is thrown into the text and then works without the error.
My god, what a kludge.