Raise error in SAS EG

Question

I have a SAS EG program that checks if a file exists and refuses to replace it if it dose exists.

When this happens I want SAS EG to show an error on that program and display a meaningful custom error message in the log. And I want the error message to look the same as other error messages people are used to seeing in the log so they pay attention to it.

For now I have just imported a file with a name of my error message. This is not great because it appends file not found messages to the message I want to display.

Is there any way I can declare that there is an error and provide an error message to put in the LOG

Answer 1

The SAS log uses a very simple way to change text color: the first word in the line of text to display in the log. You can recreate ERROR, WARNING, and NOTE messages in both %put and put statements.

%put NOTE: This is a note;
%put WARNING: This is a warning;
%put ERROR: I AM ERROR;

For example, let's say you want to display an error if a certain value is missing.

data have;
    input var;
    datalines;
1
.
2
3
.
;
run;

%put NOTE: Now checking for missing values...;

data _null_;
    set have;

    if(missing(var) ) then 
       put 'ERROR: A missing value for "var" was found at observation ' _N_;
run;

You can also do this with macros, such as creating a flag during certain check steps, or using the &syserr automatic macro variable.

%macro check;
    %let e  = 0;

    data _null_;
        set have;

        if(missing(var) ) then call symput('e', 1);
    run;

    %if(&e) %then %put ERROR: An error was found.;
%mend;