Here, the INPUT function in combination with the w.d informat reads the character value of TempCharacter as a numeric value and assigns the numeric value 98.6 to TemperatureNumber. Use the PUT ...

The PUT function is useful for converting a numeric value to a character value. For more information, see the PUT function in SAS Language Reference: Dictionary. %SYSFUNC The %SYSFUNC (or %QSYSFUNC) ...