topic Concatenating strings using || operator in SAS Programming

Concatenating strings using || operator

gurpreetkaur — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:29:34 GMT

Hi Experts,

I am concatenating 2 strings using || operator. Below is the question:

data sample;

length string1 $20.;

string1 = "Gurpreet";

string2 = "Kaur";

string1 = string1 || string2;

run;

My question is: The value of string1 in the dataset should be "GurpreetKaur". But the value is being shown as "Gurpreet" only. Please explain.

Thanks,

Gurpreet

Re: Concatenating strings using || operator

Jagadishkatam — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:37:24 GMT

Please try with cats function, may the additional spaces are inhibiting from displaying the full name

data sample;
length string1 $20.;
string1 = "Gurpreet";
string2 = "Kaur";
string1 = cats(string1,string2);
run;

proc print;
run;

Re: Concatenating strings using || operator

RW9 — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:44:14 GMT

Yes, do remember that a string is an array of characters. Where you define string1 to be $20 this means 20 boxes each with its own character. So when you concatenate "Gurpreet " with "Kaur", and put those 24 characters back into a variable which can only hold 20 characters the last four are dropped.

There are pletny of options to resolve this, for instance strip() each value:

string1=strip(string1)||strip(string2);

Or as @Jagadishkatam has given you, the cats() function would work well, note however you might want a space between so catx would be a better choice:

string1=catx(' ',string1,string2);