I am trying to use the strip function to reduce the length of a character variable from 255 characters to 3 characters (the longest value has 3 characters).   data lengths; set courtdata; new =  strip (ADJCLASS); run;   I have read the thread here: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/SAS-strip-function-doesn-t-work/td-p/434757   But it is unclear from the previous thread how the problem is actually fixed. I am ultimately trying to convert this variable from character to numeric, but I think I will need to strip it first.    Thanks!! ... View more