Well, I am glad you have a solution. The . is created because the variables are numeric. You could just convert them to character. As for the other system, it shouldn't matter to it if there is a space there, though I can understand it probably doesn't like "." as that is a SAS specific thing. You could of course do:
line=compress(cats(col1,col2,col3),".");
To get rid of the dot, though as always, the cats string is doing an implicit conversion to character on your numeric values. I advise against letting it guess this and put it in explicitly:
line=compress(cats(put(col1,3.),put(col2,3.),col3),".");
In the above you can set the format of the number to whatever you want, and its clear that it is number to character conversion.
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