| Kirk Paul Lafler |
SAS functions are an essential component of the SAS Base software. Representing a variety of built-in and callable routines, functions serve as the "work horses" in the SAS software providing users with "ready-to-use" tools designed to ease the burden of writing and testing often lengthy and complex code for a variety of programming tasks. The advantage of using SAS functions is evident by their relative ease of use, and their ability to provide a more efficient, robust, and scalable approach to simplifying a process or programming task. SAS functions span several functional categories, including character, numeric, character string matching, data concatenation, truncation, data transformation, search, date and time, arithmetic and trigonometric, hyperbolic, state and zip code, macro, random number, statistical and probability, financial, SAS file I/O, external files, external routines, sort, to name a few. This paper highlights the old, alternate, and new method of concatenating strings and/or variables together. |