NOTE: More on CAT Functions

Further to last week's post on using the CAT functions, Jack Hamilton emailed me with some further advice:

There are also problems with the CAT functions in PROC SQL. I don't remember the exact details, but I had something like this:

select catx(', ', a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i)
into :macrovar

If the result string exceeded a certain size, it was truncated.

In this particular case I went back to the concatenation operator.

In general, functions that return a string value can look at their destination to decide how long the result can be. In this case, there is no predefined destination length, and the function arbitrarily chose a length that was too small.

Good advice. There's no reason to avoid the CAT functions, but they do need to be used with the same degree of consideration as other string functions and you need to pay attention to lengths.

Thanks Jack