This chapter will focus on introducing SAS capabilities that can help us to manipulate and transform data effectively. This chapter builds on some of the functions that we introduced in Chapter 1, Introduction to SAS Programming. The functions shared in this chapter will focus on capabilities that are tactical in nature and help to perform the task at hand. Some of the functions are similar in nature to what users of Microsoft Excel would use. However, the breadth and scope of these functions are expansive in SAS.
The number of functions in each SAS software update has been increasing. In the 9.4 release, there are more than 500 functions. These functions can be categorized as follows:
- Character string matching and manipulation (including concatenation, replacement, and truncation)
- Currency conversion
- Date and time
- Descriptive statistics
- Financial...
