Compress not working as expected

[SASPhile]

There is a sas dataset and a variable Raw_Source has value as shown below( It is one value but the disorder has come to next line)

Raw_Source

Intestinal

Disorder

I used compress(raw_source,'kw') to get the result as "Intestinal Disorder". but instead the result comes as "IntestinalDisorder".

How to fix this issue? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[SASKiwi]

Are you confusing the COMPRESS and COMPBL functions? COMPRESS removes all spaces between words while COMPBL leaves single spaces between words: https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=lefunctionsref&docsetTarget=p1si0i16bcqti7n1jxxxe1hstunq.htm...

[Patrick · Accepted solution]

You're likely dealing with LF which you might get from importing data from Excel. I guess what you need is replacing such non-printable characters with a blank rather than just removing them.

Below using RegEx as the "big stick" to address any potential whitespace characters at once. Consecutive whitespace characters will be replaced with a single blank.

data have;
  Raw_Source='Intestinal'||'0A'x||'Disorder';
  Raw_Source2=prxchange('s/\s+/ /oi',-1,trim(raw_source));
  output;
  stop;
run;
proc print data=have;
run;