topic Re: Trouble with substr in New SAS User

Trouble with substr

marleeakerson — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:33:34 GMT

I am trying to extract the year from a date variable (in the dataset as MM/DD/YYYY). But every time I use the substr statement, I get random numbers that are not even in the date variable at all. I first converted the original date variable from the number of days passed from Jan 1,1960 format to the MM/DD/YYYY format so i am wondering if that is contributing to it.

Thank you!

data want;
set have;
Year=substr(Date,7,4);
run;

Re: Trouble with substr

Reeza — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:37:39 GMT

How did you do that conversion?
Why not just use the YEAR() function on the original variable?

data want;
set have;
year = year(origDate);
run;

Re: Trouble with substr

VDD — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:37:59 GMT

leave the date the way it was if Date is a valid SAS date.

then do something like this:

data temp;
sasdate = "10NOV2009"d;
day = day(sasdate);
month = month(sasdate);
year = year(sasdate);
format sasdate date9.;
run;
  
proc print data = temp;
run;

Re: Trouble with substr

novinosrin — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:38:00 GMT

HI @marleeakerson First things to note:

1. Is your data a SAS date numeric variable that is just formatted for display with some format?

2. If not, is it properly left aligned character variable(though not important, improves sanity checks)

3. run a proc contents and proc print with obs=10 records to know and see what the data(date variable) really is

The above 3 will lead us to next steps

Re: Trouble with substr

Tom — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:42:22 GMT

@marleeakerson wrote:

I am trying to extract the year from a date variable (in the dataset as MM/DD/YYYY). But every time I use the substr statement, I get random numbers that are not even in the date variable at all. I first converted the original date variable from the number of days passed from Jan 1,1960 format to the MM/DD/YYYY format so i am wondering if that is contributing to it.

Thank you!
data want;
set have;
Year=substr(Date,7,4);
run;

You need to show your data. If DATE is a character string like '10/03/2019' then you are asking for characters number 7 thru 10 which would be '2019'. If DATE is number with the MMDDYY10. format attach to it then it will first be converted to a character string using the BEST12. format. So '03OCT2019'd would be converted to:

"       21825"

And then the 7th to 10th characters would be " 218".

So you want a number out?

year=year(date);

Or a string?

year=put(year(date),4.);