SAS: Quoting Problems - sas

Question

I am trying to generate a script from within SAS. Unfortunately, I need to write the line
strMSHTA = "mshta.exe ""about:<input type=file id=FILE>" _
& "<script>FILE.click();new ActiveXObject('Scripting.FileSystemObject')" _
& ".GetStandardStream(1).WriteLine(FILE.value);close();resizeTo(0,0);</script>"""
To write the script to file, I am using the following approach:
/* write the script to file */
filename outfile ".\temp.vbs";
data _null_;
file outfile;
put 'WScript.Echo "Hello, World!"';
run;
/* run the script */
data _null_;
call system(".\temp.vbs");
run;
/* housekeeping */
%let rc=%sysfunc(fdelete(outfile));
%symdel rc;
filename outfile clear;
Unfortunately, the put statement doesn't take kindly to &, ', and ". I have tried all of the macro quoting functions, but cannot get anything to work. If necessary, I could use the overloaded concatenation operator + instead of &. Doing this leaves only an error with the middle line due to the single quotes on ActiveXObject('Scripting.FileSystemObject'). Any ideas?

Answer 1

Not sure I understand the problem. Using single quotes instead of double quotes on the outside of your literal strings will eliminate the need to worry about macro triggers like & or %, but you will still need to double up any literal single quote characters you need to generate.
put
'strMSHTA = "mshta.exe ""about:<input type=file id=FILE>" _'
/' & "<script>FILE.click();new ActiveXObject(''Scripting.FileSystemObject'')" _'
/' & ".GetStandardStream(1).WriteLine(FILE.value);close();resizeTo(0,0);</script>"""'
;
You could also break your strings literals into multiple string literals and use different outer quotes for each.
put
'strMSHTA = "mshta.exe ""about:<input type=file id=FILE>" _'
/' & "<script>FILE.click();new ActiveXObject('
"'Scripting.FileSystemObject'"
')" _'
/' & ".GetStandardStream(1).WriteLine(FILE.value);close();resizeTo(0,0);</script>"""'
;