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From: Jack Hamilton on 14 Apr 2006 02:51
<http://www.excursive.com/sas/weblog/2006/04/parsing-sysparm-with-infile-magic.html>

Here's a method of using "infile magic" to parse the value of the
&SYSPARM macro variable, which is valued by setting the SYSPARM system
option, typically at execution.

options sysparm='value=37.2 start=01jan2006, end=01mar2006';

data _null_;
retain repeats 2.;
infile cards;
informat start end date9.;
input @;
_infile_ = translate("&SYSPARM.", ' ', ',');
input start= end= value= repeats=;
format start end date9.;
put (_all_) (=);
stop;
cards;

;;;;

prints:

start=01JAN2006 end=01MAR2006 value=37.2 repeats=2

A few comments:

* The separator has to be a blank for named input. Commas are
translated into blanks because under MVS a comma will appear in the
value of SYSPARM if you use JCL continuation when specifying SYSPARM.
This will, of course, present difficulties if you need to have a comma
in one of your values.

* You can assign a default value to a parameter by establishing its
value before the INPUT statement. In this case, I used the RETAIN
statement to set the value.

* The parameters can appear in any order. Unfortunately, you can't
tell (without reparsing the data) which order they did appear in.

* If you include in SYSPARM a variable which does not appear in the
INPUT statement, you'll get a note in the log and _ERROR_ will be set to 1.

* In real life, you'd want to save the values somewhere, either in
a SAS data set or with CALL SYMPUT/SYMPUTX.
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