* (Q) I have a problem with CONCAT. I use the following code: NEW FILE. DATA LIST LIST /id . BEGIN DATA 1 2 END DATA. STRING v1 v2 v3 (A10). COMPUTE v1 = "a". COMPUTE v2 = CONCAT(v1,"b"). COMPUTE v3 = CONCAT("c",v1). EXECUTE. I wanted to concatenate some string variables to a new one, however, if the first argument of CONCAT function was the variable itself, then this method failed. The result in the Data Editor was id v1 v2 v3 1,00 a a ca 2,00 a a ca but I think it should be id v1 v2 v3 1,00 a ab ca 2,00 a ab ca * (A) Posted to SPSS-X list by Raynald Levesque on 2004/03/06. This is the expected behaviour. v1 and v2 have format A10. thus the result of CONCAT(v1,"b") is the 10 characters of v1 (the last 9 of which are blanks) followed by "c" In other words the result of CONCAT(v1,"b") has 11 characters. Since v2 has room for only 10 characters, the command COMPUTE v2=CONCAT(v1,"b"). assigns only the first 10 characters of the right hand side to v2. The solution is to use COMPUTE v2=CONCAT(RTRIM(v1),"b"). The RTRIM function removes the trailing blanks contained in v1. The resulting string (after concatenation with "b") and only 2 characters and these are assigned to v2.