topic Re: lowcase and upcase functions in SAS Programming

lowcase and upcase functions

manya92 — Tue, 22 May 2018 18:36:51 GMT

What does lowcase and upcase fucntion mainly do ?

Re: lowcase and upcase functions

Cynthia_sas — Tue, 22 May 2018 18:52:46 GMT

Hi:
Have you tried them in a program? Or looked them up in the documentation. Here's the alpha list: http://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=allprodslang&docsetTarget=syntaxByType-function.htm&docsetVersion=9.4&locale=en

Cynthia

Re: lowcase and upcase functions

novinosrin — Tue, 22 May 2018 19:13:22 GMT

Assuming your question is from an intuitive sense rather than a mere purpose/task of what upcase/lowcase functions accomplishes that is converting characters to upcase(all in CAPS) and lowcase(all small letters) which I believe you would have read in the documentation and many examples online.

The intuition I am guessing you are after is when doing conditional processing or applying filter on character variables with values in mixed cases meaning some are small letters and some big and some both.

For example country-- USA,Usa,usa, UsA

Let us suppose you wanna filter the records where country equals usa. Since values are case sensitive, you are prone to get unexpected results. Therefore to make it consistent, application of upcase/lowcase functions becomes handy like

Where upcase(country)=”USA” ; here the function temporarily converts all values to UPPER case(all CAPS) and then checks for condition to do the filtering. I hope this gives some intuitive sense beyond what the function does. HTH

Re: lowcase and upcase functions

ballardw — Tue, 22 May 2018 20:30:38 GMT

While investigating those functions you may also want to investigate PROPCASE.