proc sort nodupkey left in a duplicate row

[Walternate]

Hi,

I have a dataset at the person level but with duplicate rows. It has ID and character variables A, B, and C. I wanted unique rows, so I ran this code:

proc sort nodupkey data=have;

by ID char_A char_B char_C;

run;

It worked without producing an error message, but when looking through the data I noticed that at least one duplicate row remained.

ID   Char_A        Char_B      Char_C

1         abc- d       def_g         ghi

1         abc- d       def_g         ghi

I'm not sure why this row remained in the data, as it looks like most of the duplicate rows were correctly deleted. Is there a way to troubleshoot and figure out whether there's some minor difference between the character variables or some other reason that the duplicate row wasn't removed?

Thanks!

[data_null__]

Display the values of the BY variables for the suspect observations using $HEX format, I expect you will find they are different.  There is probably a character that is displayed as a space but is not, or you have a different number of leading spaces.