Here's a good tip lifted from the e-pages of the July issue of Your SAS Technology Report.
Ever write code like the following to concatenate a bunch of fields and drive yourself crazy debugging the unbalanced parentheses, quotes, and concatenation bars resulting from the inevitable typo?
TRIM(LEFT(X1)) || ' ' || TRIM(LEFT(X2)) || ' ' || TRIM(LEFT(X3)) || ' ' || TRIM(LEFT(X4))
Well then, do your eyes a big favor and learn about the new CATX function of SAS 9, which accomplishes the same thing with this terse code:
CATX(' ', OF X1-X4)
