Date:         Thu, 20 May 2010 09:43:55 -0400
Reply-To:     that statsguy <thatstatsguy@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         that statsguy <thatstatsguy@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Concatenating 2 numerics
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

This is a question more out of curiosity than necessity, but if I use the ||
operator on 2 numeric variables, I get a character variable of length 24.
Where does the 24 come from?

data test;
input var1 var2 $ var3;
cards;
1 a 10
2 a 9
3 b 8
4 b 7
4 c 6
4 c 5
4 c 4
;
run;

data test;
set test;
var4=var1||var3;
var5=cats(var1,var3);
run;


proc contents data=test;
run;

Alphabetic List of Variables and Attributes
#    Variable    Type    Len
1    var1        Num       8
2    var2        Char      8
3    var3        Num       8
4    var4        Char     24
5    var5        Char    200

var5 has a length of 200, which is what I expected, but var4 has a length of
24.

Thanks!