Convert First letter of string to upper case WITHOUT using upcase

[PGStats]

Nobody mentioned pattern matching? Impress your friends at DM with:

data _null_;

str = "capitalize this";

Cstr = prxchange("s/^(.)/\u\1/o", 1, str);

put Cstr;

run;

PG

[data_null__]

That's the "correct answer".

[PGStats]

Beware of solutions that do not work with accented characters. Compare :

data _null_;

retain MATCHstr RANKstr UPCASEstr PROPCASEstr "évariste Galois";

MATCHstr = prxchange("s/^(.)/\u\1/o",1,MATCHstr);

if rank(substr(RANKstr,1,1)) in (97:122) then

    substr(RANKstr,1,1)=byte(rank(substr(RANKstr,1,1))-32);

substr(UPCASEstr,1,1) = UPCASE(substr(UPCASEstr,1,1));

substr(PROPCASEstr,1,1) = PROPCASE(substr(PROPCASEstr,1,1));

put _ALL_ ;

run;

MATCHstr=Évariste Galois RANKstr=évariste Galois UPCASEstr=Évariste Galois

PROPCASEstr=Évariste Galois _ERROR_=0 _N_=1

PG

[jakarman]

An beware of the assumption of 1-byte = 1 character it is something many people learned and thinking it is true.

We are living in the age of Unicode (UTF-8) word excel html are using that.   Just old dinosaurusses are forgetting this. 
If you like to dig into that area of I18N see:

SAS(R) 9.4 National Language Support (NLS): Reference Guide, Second Edition