Concatenation removing duplicates

Dinkepile — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 16:58:16 GMT

Good day

Please assist I am trying to concatenate 4 variables but if the values are duplicates I will like to output just a single value.

I have given an example below:

Var1 Var2 Var3 Var4
IN4 IN4 IN4 IN4

Concatenate:
New_Var = var1||"/"||var2||"/"||var3||"/"||var4

The expected value of variable New_Var should be IN4 not IN4/IN4/IN4/IN4

Thank you
Kind Regards
Dinkepile

Re: Concatenation removing duplicates

ballardw — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 17:56:34 GMT

No data so untested;

Data want;
   set have;
   array values (*) var1-var4;
   length new_var $ 16 ; /* this needs to large enough to accept the longest possible value*/
   do i=1 to dim(values);
      if indexw(new_var,values[i],'/')= 0 then new_var= catx('/',new_var,values[i]);
   end;
   drop i;
run;

This searches the value of the new_var for each of the variables and if it is not currently present then concatenates.

If your variables actually have different names then the order they appear on the Array statement is the order they are processed.

If the values vary by case "In4" "in4" "iN4" all of these would appear. So you may need to clean data first if spelling or case differences may occur.

topic Concatenation removing duplicates in SAS Programming

Concatenation removing duplicates

Re: Concatenation removing duplicates