It's not usually a good idea to start off multiple identical threads, because it makes it difficult for everyone including yourself to keep track of what's been suggested.
it is my first time to post here and not familiar with different sections of the community. I was not able to find the original post so re-posted it. sorry for the duplicate
Several people have already answered that for you, there is no difference. My post was an addendum to that to point out that functions are available to help readability and add additional functionality.
they have the same meaning "concatenation", so yes, you will get the same result. which one you use is up to you. I prefer the pipe symbol myself for concatenating character variables.
Once upon a time long long ago many keyboards and some of the multiple operating systems SAS runs on did not have the pipe character available. Hence use of ! instead of |.
Also, one other thing to note is that with later versions of SAS there have been several concatenation functions added which make code both more readble, shorter, and add extra functionality (such as add a delimiter or use arrays). In most cases I would use those rather than the pipe or !, however there is still uses for them.
