SAS has more than 190 of 'built-in' functions allowing you to perform a variety of programming tasks. It would be a burden to explain them all in an half day, that's the reason why we selected the most useful one in this tips and tricks.

All programming language have functions. SAS offers more than 190 functions in order to perform data manipulation and they can be used for variable creation, filtering, conditional processing, test the availability of something... In this tips and tricks, we will first review the main elements of a function, where to use them and where can we find the list of 'built-in' functions in SAS. Then we will dive in and see the following function selection:

• filter data using find function
• extract characters using substr function
• extract words in a string with scan function
• concatenate strings with cat functions
• use variable lists
• other character functions
• date functions
• numeric functions
• regex functions
• create your functions with proc FCMP

You have some SAS experience and would like to use SAS functions in order to manipulate your data.