Concatenate and Unconcatenate in SAS

[Waby]

I have 4 columns I am trying to concatenate and unconcatenate later 

   Var         Samp          Test     Unit     
      A       Sample1     Test1             
      A       Sample2                    kg  

I tried the following catx("-", Var, Samp, Test, Unit); which will give me the following and doesn't leave any room for spaces. I would like to concatenate with the space so that I can unconcatenate later. 

     New
      A-Sample1-Test1             
      A-Sample2-kg       Want       A-Sample1-Test1-            
      A-Sample2- -kg 

As for unconcatenating, I would try somethig like the following but am unsure how to use the scan function. 

data want;
set have;
array var(3) $;
do i = 1 to dim(var);
var[i]=scan(row,i,'-','M');
end;
run;

[ChrisNZ]

Your code seems fine.

Just add the variable names on the array statement.

[Waby]

Thanks. I've updated the other part of my question. In the concatenate part, how can I concatenate so that I still retain the spaces? The deliminator skips blanks.

[Jagadishkatam]

did you try as below

catx(" - ", Var, Samp, Test, Unit);

[Waby]

I did but thanks for your suggestion. I ended up resolving the issue in the unconcatenate section.

[ChrisNZ · Accepted solution]

You don't need spaces to parse it back to its initial components.

[Tom]

The CATX() function will ignore missing (including all blank character values) when building the result. If you want to keep the space for missing values then build the string yourself. For just a few values just list them, for more use some type of DO loop.

string=cat(trim(a),'-',trim(b),'-',trim(c));