CALL CATS Routine

Removes leading and trailing blanks, and returns a concatenated character string.

Category:

Character

Syntax

CALL CATS(result <, item-1, …, item-n> );

Required Argument

result

specifies a character variable.

Restriction

The CALL CATS routine accepts only a character variable as a valid argument for result. Do not use a constant or a SAS expression because CALL CATS is unable to update these arguments.

Optional Argument

item

specifies a constant, variable, or expression, either character or numeric. If item is numeric, then its value is converted to a character string using the BESTw. format. In this case, SAS does not write a note to the log.

Details

The CALL CATS routine returns the result in the first argument, result. The routine appends the values of the arguments that follow to result. If the length of result is not large enough to contain the entire result, SAS does the following:

writes a warning message to the log stating that the result was truncated
writes a note to the log that shows the location of the function call and lists the argument that caused the truncation, except in SQL or in a WHERE clause
sets _ERROR_ to 1 in the DATA step, except in a WHERE clause

The CALL CATS routine removes leading and trailing blanks from numeric arguments after it formats the numeric value with the BESTw. format.

Comparisons

The results of the CALL CATS, CALL CATT, and CALL CATX routines are usually equivalent to statements that use the concatenation operator (||) and the TRIM and LEFT functions. However, using the CALL CATS, CALL CATT, and CALL CATX routines is faster than using TRIM and LEFT.

The following table shows statements that are equivalent to CALL CATS, CALL CATT, and CALL CATX. The variables X1 through X4 specify character variables, and SP specifies a separator, such as a blank or comma.

CALL Routine	Equivalent Statement
CALL CATS(OF X1-X4);	X1=TRIM(LEFT(X1))\|\|TRIM(LEFT(X2))\|\|TRIM(LEFT(X3))\|\| TRIM(LEFT(X4));
CALL CATT(OF X1-X4);	X1=TRIM(X1)\|\|TRIM(X2)\|\|TRIM(X3)\|\|TRIM(X4);
CALL CATX(SP, OF X1-X4); *	X1=TRIM(LEFT(X1))\|\|SP\|\|TRIM(LEFT(X2))\|\|SP\|\| TRIM(LEFT(X3))\|\|SP\|\|TRIM(LEFT(X4));

CALL Routine

Equivalent Statement

CALL CATS(OF X1-X4);

X1=TRIM(LEFT(X1))||TRIM(LEFT(X2))||TRIM(LEFT(X3))||
TRIM(LEFT(X4));

CALL CATT(OF X1-X4);

X1=TRIM(X1)||TRIM(X2)||TRIM(X3)||TRIM(X4);

CALL CATX(SP, OF X1-X4); *

X1=TRIM(LEFT(X1))||SP||TRIM(LEFT(X2))||SP||
TRIM(LEFT(X3))||SP||TRIM(LEFT(X4));

Note: If any of the arguments is blank, the results that are produced by CALL CATX differ slightly from the results that are produced by the concatenated code. In this case, CALL CATX omits the corresponding separator. For example, CALL CATX("+","X"," ", "Z"," "); produces X+Z.

Example

The following example shows how the CALL CATS routine concatenates strings.

data _null_;
   length answer $ 36;
   x='Athens is t  '; 
   y=' he Olym   ';
   z='   pic site for 2004. ';
   call cats(answer,x,y,z);
   put answer;
run;

The following line is written to the SAS log:

   ----+----1----+----2----+----3----+----4----+----5----+----6----+----7
   Athens is the Olympic site for 2004.