create smallest function for character variables

BrentFulton — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 05:11:28 GMT

Dear SAS Community,

I have 3 character variables that I would like to concatenate, but prior to doing that, I want to sort them. My original dataset is id, v1, v2, v3. I would like to create the new variables concat_unsort and concat_sort below. I tried using the "smallest" function, but it tried to change my character variables into a numeric.

I'd appreciate your help.

Thanks,

Brent Fulton

UC Berkeley

data

id v1 v2 v3 concat_unsort concat_sort

1 aa bb cc aabbcc aabbcc

2 aa cc bb aaccbb aabbcc

3 01 02 03 010203 010203

4 01 03 02 010302 010203

sometimes v1...v3 may contain both letters and numbers e.g., a1

create smallest function for character variables

Peter_C — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:55:39 GMT

Call sortc()

create smallest function for character variables

BrentFulton — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:25:15 GMT

Thank you, Peter, that worked well.

-Brent

topic create smallest function for character variables in SAS Programming

create smallest function for character variables

create smallest function for character variables

create smallest function for character variables