Closing the Listing Destination

Producing HTML Output

Closing the Listing Destination

In the previous guided practices, you probably noticed that the procedure results appeared in the Output window as well as in your browser (unless you turn off Listing in the Preferences window in the Windows operating environment).

You created both listing output and HTML output because both the Listing and HTML destinations are open. By default,

the Listing destination is open
the HTML destination is closed.

Default open and closed ODS destinations

Consequently, if you do nothing, your SAS programs produce listing output. However, an open destination uses system resources. Therefore, if you want only HTML output, it's a good idea to close the listing destination before creating HTML output.

The ODS LISTING Statement

You've seen that specifying the ODS HTML statement with the CLOSE action closes the HTML destination:

     ods html close;

To close the Listing destination, submit the analogous ODS LISTING statement:

     ods listing close;

The Listing destination will remain closed until you quit your current SAS session or submit the following form of the ODS LISTING statement to re-open the Listing destination:

     ods listing;