@Kurt_Bremser , ok, but also switching as suggested to the use of translate() in combination with compbl() as per the example above, does not explain why still blanks are added where it should be not the case. As per documentation: "In a DATA step, if the TRANSLATE function returns a value to a variable that has not previously been assigned a length, then that variable is given the length of the first argument."So also trying this direction, and looking at the example mentioned of line 4, where we have a " h" bigram, the above translate(compbl(),"_"," ") should output "_h", but then we get a "_h_" output, adding another spaces at the left of the character
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