Leading blank in strings

[Cruise]

@ballardw 

data WORK.URBANICITY;
  infile datalines dsd truncover;
  input Municipality:$36. urbanicity:COMMA15.;
  format urbanicity COMMA15.;
  label Municipality="Municipality" urbanicity="urbanicity";
datalines;
Seoul 605,569,314
　　　Jongno-gu 23,972,507
　　　Jung-gu 9,974,292
　　　Yongsan-gu 21,870,000
　　　Seongdong-gu 16,804,426
;;;;

Hope I got the guidance right. This is the data I'm dealing with. 

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

Repeats of the same 3 characters is making me think that your actual data may be DBCS.

And perhaps the KCOMPRESS, KTRIM may be wanted.

[novinosrin]

@ballardw  has nailed it. That's the reason, I have nicknamed him the "Cop"

[Cruise]

@ballardw 

You hit the nail on the head! kcomp it is. Hurray!

[ChrisNZ]

Searching for   ã€€   brings up   ã€€ 文字化け

So MBCS indeed.

[Cruise]

Why then kcomp would have worked out?

[ChrisNZ]

You mean the function kcompress()?

The function kcompress() is MBCS-aware. 

The function compress() is not, it just considers individual bytes.