How to handle an apostrophe in an href in SAS - html

Question

I have a SAS program that sends out an email using HTML, but one of the folders I am trying to reference as a link contains an apostrophe:
%let body1 = %nrquote(
<ul>
<li><a href='\\server\Studies\Alzheimer's\Documents'>Alzheimer's Documents</a>
</ul>
) ;
This macro variable will be used in the following macro:
%macro sas_email(to=, subject=, body1=, body2=, body3=) ;
options
emailsys=smtp
emailhost=("smtp.gmail.com" port=465) ;
filename alert email to=(&to.)
subject="&subject."
content_type="text/html"
debug ;
data _null_ ;
file alert ;
put "&body1." ;
%if %length(&body2.) > 0 %then %do ;
put "&body2." ;
%end ;
%if %length(&body3.) > 0 %then %do ;
put "&body3." ;
%end ;
run ;
%mend sas_email ;
As you can imagine, the apostrophe in \Alzheimer's causes issues. Using double quotes instead of single gives me the error:
ERROR: A character operand was found in the %EVAL function or %IF condition where a numeric
operand is required. The condition was: %length(&body1.) > 0

Answer 1

HTML doesn't care if you use double quotes or single quotes. So your generated HTML tag could look like this:
<a href="\\server\Studies\Alzheimer's\Documents">
If you want to add single quotes into a string enclosed in single quotes then encode it.
<a href='\\server\Studies\Alzheimer%27s\Documents'>
Since you are going to use the macro variable in a data step try just using %BQUOTE() to add macro quoting when creating the value. This should let you create a string that would look to SAS like unbalanced quotes.
%let body1 = %bquote(
<ul>
<li>Alzheimer's Documents
</ul>
) ;
%let body2=;
%let body3=;
Then when using it avoid trying to expand the macro variable by using symget() function to pull the value of the macro variable into an actual variable that you can then write using the PUT statement.
data _null_;
file alert ;
length str $32767;
do i=1 to 3;
str=symget(cats('body',i));
put str ;
end;
run;