What does the concatenation operator (||) do?

The concatenation operator (||) is specifically designed to combine two or more strings into a single string. This operator allows you to merge text values in a way that they are treated as one continuous piece of information. For example, if you have two string values, "Hello" and "World", using the concatenation operator would result in "HelloWorld" or "Hello World" depending on how you format the strings or include spaces.

Understanding this functionality is crucial for data manipulation in SAS, especially when preparing data for reporting or creating new variables. While options related to joining tables, calculating averages, or separating values pertain to different functionalities in data handling, they do not relate to what the concatenation operator specifically does.