topic REmoving interior Blanks in SAS Procedures

REmoving interior Blanks

Statsconsultancy — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:30:47 GMT

I Have the following data set;

Data daset1;
Input location height;
cards;
A 0.2
A 0.8
B 0.1
.....
run;
I then use the following command to create a new column.

Data daset2;
set Dataset1;
locheight = location || height;
run;

The output is displayed below

location height locheight
A 0.2 A 0.2
A 0.8 A 0.8
B 0.1 B 0.1

Does anyone know how to remove the interior blanks on elements of locheight. That the output appears as folows:

location height locheight
A 0.2 A0.2
A 0.8 A0.8
B 0.1 B0.1

Re: REmoving interior Blanks

Flip — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:39:27 GMT

compress(location || height);
or
cats(location , height);

Re: REmoving interior Blanks

jj030655 — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:19:25 GMT

Sometimes trailing blanks are troublesome so try using TRIM.

concat = trim(var1) || var2; *---> trim removes trailing blanks;

another function you may find of interest...COMPRESS

concat = var1 || var2;
concat = compress(concat); *---> takes out internal spaces and other chars by default;

Re: REmoving interior Blanks

Florent — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:55:47 GMT

Hello,

You could also use the combination of the COMPBL and COMPRESS functions.
The first one will replace double blanks by a single blank whereas the second one will remove the single blanks from your variable.

e.g:

Data daset2;
set Dataset1;
locheight = compress(compbl(location || height));
run;

Regards,
Florent