Greetings all.  This is a follow up to my last question here, https://communities.sas.com/thread/34254 where I was trying to convert between ascii and ebcdic values.  However, this is a new problem I am having, so I will leave that one alone.  As it is right now, I am able to use an array in a data step to provide the lookup values of ascii to ebcdic.  Basically I am looking at each set of 2 characters in the ascii string, and returning the ebcdic value, which is contatanated to itself to produce the full ebcdic string.  Below is the code /* set up an accounts table to hold the ascii string.  In reality there would be millions of observations,    and the ascii_string could be up to 512 characters in length.*/ data Accounts; input ID ASCII_STRING $3-30; datalines; 1 420000009D800C4400000002DF40 ; /* Now use an array to provide the ascii to ebcdic lookup values, and use the ebcdic values to build    an ebcdic string.  In reality the array would be (2, 256), to cover all possible ascii values, but    I have limited it here to only the ones in the ascii string.  I tested this code with the full ascii    character set on a table with around 250,000 observations, and it took only a couple of seconds to    execute. */ data accounts2; set accounts; length x $ 2; length EBCDIC_VAL $ 512; array ascii_ebcdic {2,9} $   (   '00' '02' '0C' '40' '42' '44' '80' '9D' 'DF'   '00' '02' '0C' '7C' 'C2' 'C4' '20' '14' '59'   ); do i = 1 to length(ascii_string)-1 by 2;   x='';   do j = 1 to 9; *this would be j = 1 to 256 in reality;    if substr(ascii_string,i,2) = trim(ascii_ebcdic(1,j)) then do;     x = trim(ascii_ebcdic(2,j));    end;   end;   EBCDIC_VAL = cats(EBCDIC_VAL,x); end; drop  ascii_ebcdic1-ascii_ebcdic512 x i j; run; *see the results; proc print data = accounts2; quit; Now, this works perfectly, and seems to be fast.  This is all very new to me, so I am limited to trial and error.  My problem is that I do not want to have include the array statement and loops every time I want to convert between ascii and ebcdic in a data step, so I thought I would try a user defined function, like in VBA or SQL, then just call it when I need to convert between ascii and ebcdic.  I will post the code below, and I know it does not work, but I wanted you all to know where I am with this.  I sure would appreciate any tips, or links to documents that might describe a similar situation to this one.  Thank you for your time and help so far. /* I want the array to be a separate entity from the function, so it does not have to populate    with each call to the function.  When I run this I can see something is created in work.funcs,    but I don't know how to determine what it is. */ proc fcmp outlib=work.funcs.ascii_ebcdic; subroutine ascii_ebcdic (); array ascii_ebcdic [2,9] $ ('00' '02' '0C' '40' '42' '44' '80' '9D' 'DF'         '00' '02' '0C' '7C' 'C2' 'C4' '20' '14' '59'); endsub; run; /* I want this function to be able to reference the array ascii_ebcdic, but I keep getting an error,    'WARNING: Cannot find a library containing subroutine ASCII_EBCDIC'.  I don't know if this is    because my array was not created, or because my syntax is not correct.  I looked at several    documents dealing with functions, but I could not find one specific to this need. */    proc fcmp outlib=work.funcs.ascii_ebcdic; function AsciiToEbcdic(ascii_string) $; length x $ 2; length ebcdic_string $ 28; do i = 1 to length(ascii_string)-1 by 2;   x='';   do j = 1 to 9;    if substr(ascii_string,i,2) = trim(ascii_ebcdic(1,j)) then do;     x = trim(ascii_ebcdic(2,j));    end;   end;   ebcdic_string = cats(ebcdic_string,x); end; return(ebcdic_string); endsub; run; ... View more