SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9, Third Edition

Nesting SAS Functions

Throughout this chapter, you've seen examples of individual functions. For example, in this assignment statement the SCAN function selects the middle name (third word) from the variable Name:

MiddleName=scan(name,3);

Then this assignment statement uses the SUBSTR function to select the first letter from the variable MiddleName:

MiddleInitial=substr(MiddleName,1,1);

To write more efficient programs, however, you can nest functions as appropriate. For example, you can nest the SCAN function within the SUBSTR function in an assignment statement to compute the value for MiddleInitial:

MiddleInitial=substr(scan(name,3),1,1);

This example of nested numeric functions determines the number of years between June 15, 1999, ...