SAS Day 24: Space Trick
Background:
My boss has a motto “Devil in the details“. I think all the Space- Related issues are the “Devil” in SAS.
Today, we will go over the function and tricks I used to deal with Space.
- Remove Space: Compress, Compbl, Strip, Trim
- Concatenate with Remove Space: ||, CAT, CATS, CATX, CATT

analogicus / Pixabay
Group 1: Compress, Compbl, Strip, Trim
1.Compress: Remove all the blanks by default, it can remove any specified characters as well.
2.Compbl: Compress multiple blanks into a single blank
3.Strip: Remove Leading and Trailing Blanks
4.Trim: Remove Trailing blank
Example:
Code:
data test; input first $ last $ tel $29.; datalines; Mary Smith 61 5- 999- 2222 Keith O 777-2 22- 1234 Jay Chou 4 15-221-99 98 Lionel Messi 312-45 6-1111 Chris Wu 480 -9 00-87 63 ; run; data space; set test; compress=compress(tel,"-"); compbl=compbl(tel); strip=strip(tel); trim= trim(tel); run;
Group 2: ||, CAT, CATT, CATS, CATX
||: directly concatenates character strings without modification.
CAT: concatenates character strings with leading or trailing space
CATT: concatenates character strings and removes trailing blanks
CATS: concatenates character strings and remove trailing and leading blanks
CATX: concatenates character strings and remove trailing and leading blanks, and inserts a separator between each string.
Code:
data sample; set test; direct=first||last; cat=cat(first,last); catt=catt(first,last); cats=cats(first,last); catx=catx(".", first, last); run;
Ref:https://www.lexjansen.com/nesug/nesug09/cc/CC25.pdf
Happy Studying! ☕