RE: DO IF Block appears to execute regardless

[Stuart McKenzie]

Hi Ben

Thanks for the follow up.  The error was a 'kind of' red herring.  I have
a script that needs to run across 2 different data sources  and the
variable list doesn't quite match between them. I was wanting to use the
DO IF block to execute a specific set of actions against only one of the
data sources, as the block referred to a variable that was only in one of
the data sources.  So I suspect that it is the compilation and validation
of the script that was throwing the error when it encounters a reference
to a variable that isn't in the script. I had erroneously thought that the
error was being thrown during execution, not validation.

Regards
Stuart


-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Pfaff [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Monday, 3 February 2014 5:04 AM
To: Stuart McKenzie
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: DO IF Block appears to execute regardless

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 02:49:33PM +1100, Stuart McKenzie wrote:
> I have a block of code
>
> COMPUTE PulseCheck = INDEX(UPCASE(@JobName),"PULSE") > 0.
>
> DO IF (PulseCheck < 1).
>       Recode CONT (Convert) into CONT1.
>       *do other stuff
> END IF.
>
> If I include the line
> LIST PulseCheck
> I see that PulseCheck is being calculated correctly so that line
> appears to be correct, however, the DO IF block of code currently
> executes regardless of the value of PulseCheck. This script is used to
> run across 2 data files, one of which has the CONT variable and the
> other doesn't, so I need to skip over this block when the CONT
> variable does not exist.  Am I missing something stupidly obvious
> here? The less preferred solution is to use 2 scripts, but that has
> other implications which I would prefer not to have to deal with.

I finally took a look at this.  Sorry about the long delay.

I can't reproduce the problem here.  When I run the following, for
example:

    DATA LIST LIST NOTABLE/input.
    BEGIN DATA.
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    END DATA.
    DO IF input < 3.
        RECODE input (1=2)(ELSE=COPY) INTO output.
    END IF.
    LIST.

I see the expected output:

    Data List
       input   output
    -----------------
        1.00     2.00
        2.00     2.00
        3.00        .
        4.00        .
        5.00        .

which shows that indeed the RECODE isn't doing anything for input values
less than 3.

If you can provide a complete example of syntax that doesn't behave as you
expect, I'll figure out the problem.

Thanks,

Ben.