Concatenating String Variables in IBM SPSS Statistics
What is Concatenating?
Merging two or more sting variables into a single variable is called concatenating variables This function can be very useful if you are working with string data in SPSS One common use of this function is to bring first name and last name from two variables into one single full name variable
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How to Concatenate?
String Variables can be concatenated in IBM SPSS Statistics using the CONCAT function The following syntax demonstrates using a compute command to bring three single name variables together into a single variable, which combines the three into a full name variable
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CONCAT Function in Syntax
The first piece of syntax simply creates a datafile in SPSS to be worked with •
DATA LIST /First_Name 1-4(A) Initial 5-6(A) Last_Name 6-20(A). BEGIN DATA Rob E Barry Ian L O'Connell Ted W Payne Rod G Early Con T Not Cat P Murphy Pat C Clifford Bob A O'Sullivan END DATA. 4
CONCAT Function in Syntax
The STRING function below creates a string variable with 64 characters allocated to it•
STRING Full_Name(A64)
The CONCAT Function is then used to combine the three variables ‘First_Name’, ‘Initial’ and ‘Last_Name’ Notice how CONCAT needs to use the functions ‘rtrim’ and ‘trim’, which remove any blank spaces on the left side (ltrim) and the right side (rtrim) •
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COMPUTE Full_Name =CONCAT(rtrim(ltrim(First_Name))," ",rtrim(ltrim(Initial))," ",rtrim(ltrim(Last_Name))). EXEUTE.
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