What's your best trick to break out of an unbalanced quote condition in BASE SAS?

Question

As a base SAS programmer, you know the drill: You submit your SAS code, which contains an unbalanced quote, so now you've got not only and unclosed quote, but also unclosed comments, macro function definitions, and a missing run; or quit; statement. What's your best trick for not having those unbalanced quotes bother you?

Accepted Answer

enterprise guide 3 used to put the following line at the top of its automatically generated code:

```
*';*";*/;run;
```

however, the only way to really "reset" from all kinds of something unbalanced problems is to quit the sas session, and balance whatever is unbalanced before re-submitting the code. Using this kind of quick (cheap?) hacks does not address the root cause.

by the way, `ods _all_ close;` closes all the ods destinations, including the default, results destination. in an interactive session, you should open it again with `ods results;` or `ods results on;` at least according to the documention. but when i tested it on my 9.2, it did not work, as shown below:

```
%put sysvlong=&sysvlong sysscpl=&sysscpl;
/* sysvlong=9.02.01M0P020508 sysscpl=X64_VSPRO */

ods _all_ close;
proc print data=sashelp.class;
run;
/* on log
WARNING: No output destinations active.
*/

ods results on;
proc print data=sashelp.class;
run;
/* on log
WARNING: No output destinations active.
*/
```

What's your best trick to break out of an unbalanced quote condition in BASE SAS?

Solution

Problem