title: SAS - how to mask double quotes (e.g. "")
body: <p>I am running a VBA program from SAS. The SAS code for this basically looks like:</p>
  <pre><code>%let worksheet =&amp;i; *worksheet number;
  %let xlsfile = %STR(&quot;&quot;C:\Data\Excel Workbook.xlsx&quot;&quot;);
  %let csvfile = %STR(&quot;&quot;C:\Data\CSV File..csv&quot;&quot;);
  
  
  x 'cd &quot;C:\Data\MN2013\Alignment\Data\SAS Programs&quot;';
  x &quot;XlsWsToCsv.vbs &amp;xlsfile &amp;worksheet &amp;csvfile&quot;;
  </code></pre>
  <p>I need to be able to include two double quotes (i.e. &quot;&quot;) at the beginning and end of the file paths in the xlsfile and csvfile for the VBA program to recognize the spaces in the file paths and run correctly.</p>
  <h3>MY PROBLEM:</h3>
  <p>I run this in SAS Enterprise Guide using SAS 9.3. In my log, directly after the variable definition is read in, the double quotes are underlined in red (usually indicating an error) with the number 49 below. There is no error message, but instead, in green I get the following note:</p>
  <pre><code>NOTE 49-169: The meaning of an identifier after a quoted string might change in a future SAS 
           release.  Inserting white space between a quoted string and the succeeding 
           identifier is recommended.
  </code></pre>
  <p>To me, this says SAS is reading these double quotes. They are somehow only partially being masked. My VBA program runs, so I could continue with this; but I like clean error logs. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to completely mask my xlsfile and csvfile variables? I've tried using %STR (as shown in my example above), %BQUOTE, %SUPERQ, and a few other things to make this work.</p>