For additional information on changing columns from character to numeric and vice versa, refer to the PUT and INPUT functions and formats and informats in SAS Language Reference: Dictionary. The ...

If you use a numeric variable with an operator that requires a character value, such as the concatenation operator, the numeric value is converted to character using the BEST12. format. Because SAS ...

- You need to turn a character into its numeric ASCII (ISO) or Unicode code. - The built-in function ord also accepts as its argument a Unicode string of length one, in which case it returns a Unicode ...