What does the COUNT function do in SAS?

The COUNT function in SAS is designed to count the number of occurrences of a specific substring within a character string. It operates by analyzing a given string for the presence of another substring and returns the total number of times that substring appears. This is particularly useful for text data analysis where understanding frequency of specific patterns or terms is needed.

Other functions such as the COUNTW function are typically used to count the number of words in a string, and the NOBS option in the SET statement can count the number of observations in a dataset. When working with the COUNT function, it's important to remember that its primary focus is on substrings and character manipulation, differentiating it from functionalities aimed at counting unique values, total rows, or characters in a string.