topic Re: Concatenate consecutive column values in SAS Programming

Concatenate consecutive column values

Anthony_eng — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:58:32 GMT

Hello,

I am trying to concatenate values from the same column in sas. I have tried multiple versions of the cat function and am not able to get this to work properly. There are blanks that I would like to use to cause the concatenation column to delete its previous values and start again with the current value. I have an example below. The Conc Column is my desired goal. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Column 1 Column2 Conc Column

a x1 x1

b x2 x1 x2

c x3 x1 x2 x3

e x5 x5

f x6 x5 x6

Re: Concatenate consecutive column values

Tom — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 17:03:23 GMT

What did you try? How did it not work?

data want;
  set have;
  length new_column $200;
  retain new_column;
  if column2 = ' ' then new_column=' ';
  else new_column=catx(' ',new_column,column2);
run;

Re: Concatenate consecutive column values

Anthony_eng — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 17:14:56 GMT

I tried using concatValue = cats(column1, ' ', column2); and it wasn't creating spaces between the concatenated values. I also tried to use an IF-THEN-DO statement to retain the value, set the concatValue to blank space (= ' ') when needed, but I did it all in the IFTHEN statement. I am guessing that was causing the issue. I tried multiple iterations/changes and failed over and over. Thanks for the help.