Very basic thing I can't seem to figure out. Columns in a particular table are numbers with underscores in front of them, I have a number stored in a macro variable and the name of the column I want to use is that number with an underscore. Say the number is 9, when I write the following code I get a column where each observation is _9 rather than column _9 from that dataset.
proc sql; create table TM1 as select cats("_",&rat_as_num) from default_data; quit; 1 Answer
CATS returns a string, not a variable name. So the variable name will not matter, you get a string with _RAT_AS_NUM_VALUE.
To return a variable name use %SYSFUNC() instead,
data test; _9 = 4; run; %let rat_as_num=9; proc sql; create table test2 as select %sysfunc(cats(_, &rat_as_num)) from test; quit; proc print data=test2; run; Per @Richards comments this also works:
proc sql; create table test2 as select _&rat_as_nun from test; quit; 
