Date:         Thu, 1 Mar 2012 16:57:14 -0500
Reply-To:     Phil Rack <philrack@MINEQUEST.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Phil Rack <philrack@MINEQUEST.COM>
Subject:      Stripping quotes off of text contained in a macro variable

I'm really struggling here and I hope someone can lend me a hand. I'm trying
to do some error checking and cleanup on some code. I have a macro that
takes a file name and checks to see if it exists and does some stuff if it
does. However, the user may enter the file name in the macro with quotes and
I want to be able to remove them before doing any processing.

Here is an example.


    %macro getfile(fn=);
    %put &fn;
    %mend;

    %getfile(fn=c:\temp\somefile.txt);

and returns: c:\temp\somefile.txt

if the user enters the value with quotes such as:

    %getfile(fn="c:\temp\somefile.txt");

it returns:  "c:\temp\somefile.txt"

I want the quotes stripped off so it returns:
  c:\temp\somefile.txt

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Phil Rack