Most SAS programmers use capital letters, indentations, and spacing in a way that makes it easier for themselves and other users to read and understand their program.
A statement can span more than one line, as long as it ends with a semicolon. Multiple statements on the same line are okay, provided they are separated by a semicolon. Extra lines between statements are ignored. Indentations or spacing before a statement are ignored. SAS is not case sensitive uppercase and lowercase letters are recognized as the same, even for variable names. SAS is more relaxed than other coding languages when it comes to capitalization, indentation, and line breaks. The example text string below shows that SAS recognizes the first two lines as text (indicated by the coloring), but only recognizes part of the text as such in the third line. One word of caution: if your text contains an apostrophe, then you must enclose it with quotation marks. You know you have properly typed text values when SAS changes the color of the words into a purplish-pink color. You will need to enclose text in quotation marks or apostrophes if you need to reference values of a character variable, reference a file directory, or assign a title to your output, to name a few example. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, but be sure each text block starts and ends with the same one. SAS recognizes text as long as it is enclosed in quotation marks ( "text") or apostrophes ( 'text'). Omitting the semicolon is the most common mistake new users make. This generally corresponds to every line ending in a semi-colon, but sometimes your commands or statements will be more than one line and a semicolon is only necessary at the end of the statement. SemicolonsĮvery statement must end with a semicolon. There are some conventions of SAS syntax that new users should know before getting started. SAS syntax is the set of rules that dictate how your program must be written in order for SAS to understand it. You can save your program so that it can be edited and reused after it’s written. A SAS program is written in the Editor window and contains a series of statements that tell SAS what to do (e.g., import a dataset, give a frequency count of a variable).
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