Super-easy fix to SAS Libname / Missing Directory

In August, I attended a class at Unite 2014 (on Unity game development) and the presenter said,

“And some of you, your code won’t run and you’ll swear you did exactly what was shown in the examples. But, of course, all of the rest of us will know that is not true.”

This perfectly describes my experience teaching. For example, the problem with the LIBNAME.

I tell students,

Do not just copy and paste the LIBNAME from a Word document into your program. Often, this will cause problems because of extra formatting codes in the word processor. You may not see the code as any different from what you typed in, but it may not work. Type your LIBNAME statement into the program.

Apparently, students believe that when I say,

Do not just copy and paste the LIBNAME statement.

either, that what I really mean is,

Sure, go ahead and copy and paste the LIBNAME statement

or, that I did mean it but that is only because I want to force them to do extra typing, or because I am so old that I am against copying and pasting as a new-fangled invention and how the hell would I know if they copied and pasted it anyway.

Then their program does not work.

Very likely, their log looks something like this:

58         LIBNAME mydata “/courses/d1234455550/c_2222/” access=readonly;

59          run ;

NOTE: Library MYDATA does not exist.

All quotation marks are not created equal.

What you see above if you look very closely is that the end quote at the end of the path for the LIBNAME statement does not exactly match the beginning quote. Therefore, your reference for your library was not

/courses/d1234455550/c_2222/

but rather, something like

/courses/d1234455550/c_2222/  access=readonly run ;

Which is not what you had in mind, and, as SAS very reasonably told you, that directory does not exist.

The simplest fix: delete the quotation marks and TYPE in quotes.

LIBNAME mydata ‘/courses/d1234455550/c_2222/’ access=readonly;

If that doesn’t work, do what I said to begin with. Erase your whole LIBNAME statement and TYPE it into the program without copying and pasting.

Contrary to appearances, I don’t just make this shit up.