tests whether condition is true. If the condition is true, the action in the THEN clause is carried out. If condition is false and an ELSE statement is present, then the ELSE action is carried out. If condition is false and no ELSE statement is present, then the next statement in the DATA step is processed. Condition specifies one or more numeric or character comparisons. action must be an executable statement. That is, one that can be processed in an individual iteration of the DATA step. (Statements that affect the entire DATA step, such as LENGTH, are not executable.)

searches source for the string given in excerpt. Both source and excerpt can be any type of character expressions, such as character variables, character strings that are enclosed in quotation marks, other character functions, and so on. When excerpt is present in source, the function returns the position of the first character of excerpt (a positive number). When excerpt is not present, the function returns a 0.

produces an uppercase value of argument, which can be any type of character expression, such as a character variable, character string enclosed in quotation marks, other character functions, and so on.