To all,   Thank you so much. I don't recall exactly what I did to arrive at this situation, but I tried many things (not, however, unquoting. That's a good rule of thumb to know) to get rid of the apparent space that was being inserted in the dataset name. My paranoia drove me to put %str()s around everything.   As a test, I tried the following: %let nmend = %str(EQ)elig; Then data tbl1_3&nmend. gave me 2 datasets (tbl1_3 and EQelig), whereas data %unquote(tbl1_3&nmend) gave me one dataset (tbl1_3EQelig). ... View more