@agbpilot,   You're very welcome.     I just got back from a hike, and I was reviewing the data vs. the results.  The results are actually pretty darned good.  (of course this is a small dataset and the real measure of efficacy will be garnered from a larger sample).   Some observations: The Wrld_Cities file only has data for Puerto Rico and Japan, so no matter how fancy our logic is, we can only match country codes PR and JP for now. In the Intl file, there are three records from PR, and all three were matched.  That's 100% match.  Can't get much better than that. In the Intl file, there are 16 records from JP; 13 were matched.  That's 81%.  Not too shabby.  The three that were not matched were not matched for the following reasons: Two had only numbers with no alpha city.  There's no way to text match on these.  We have to take some other approach on these. The third, Tokyo, had no corresponding record in the Wrld_Cities file. So, at least with this small set of data, the array/hash look up method is working surprisingly well -- when we have data.  The Wrld_Cities file is missing a lot of data.  To improve the match rate, the first thing we might want to do is to get more data put into the Wrld_Cities file.     Jim       ... View more

@agbpilot wrote: Hi, thanks for your reply and suggestion.  In my process since I am re-using the same data set name "COLLIN" across multiple steps, I ended up just having to run the program in its entirety and the output is now working as desired.   One question about retain.  For numeric values, I typically initialize the value to zero.  Here in this example, I'm not explicitly initializing the character value.  However, the code is producing the desired outcome.  So I've left it alone..  But if I were to explicitly initialize these character variables, I guess I would want to initialize them to missing or ' '.  Is there a best practice for initializing character variables using retain?  i.e., would a character variable with a max length of $5. have to be initialized in the retain statement as '     ' ?  Or could I just define the length of this variable being retained in the format statement as $5.?   Andy  Default behavior for Retain and character values is to initialize to missing. If I have a specific value that I need in my data I initialize it in the Retain statement. I tend to define the length explicitly before any Retain statement. The default format for any character variable defined in a Length statement would the $nn. where nn is the length so the format is generally not needed. Order of statements matters and if you retain and initialize a character variable without a length statement prior will result in a length of the initial value.  Since counting multiple spaces to initialize blanks is awkward at best I leave that to the Length statement. Plus it is easier to see from the code what the intended length was because counting spaces .... ... View more