topic Re: Date format in SAS Programming

Date format

Jbraun — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:06:07 GMT

Dear SAS users

I have a variable "Birth_date" with dates of birth. The variable containts numbers between 14316 and 36329. As far as I know the SAS date of birth format counts from the year 1960 so that jan 1st 1960 is "1" and so forth.

If I do a proc freq with a date9. format I get dates between year 2011 and year 2052. That doesn't quite make sense since the data should be covering current employees from ages at maybe 16 and up. So I would expect dates between maybe year 1940 and year 2000 or something like that:

proc freq data =NEW.Samlet;

format Birth_date date9.;

table Birth_date;

run;

Am I doing something wrong or does my data simply contain nonsense?

Kind regards,

Jacob

Re: Date format

RW9 — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:09:10 GMT

Where do you get those numbers from? 14316=13MAR1999?

Did you get the data from Excel, if so Excel holds date values from a different base date so the number is different.

Re: Date format

Jbraun — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:24:02 GMT

Dear RW9

The data comes from an employee database and we use SAS primarily so therefore I was expecting the numbers to express a SAS-format. I thought that maybe the explanation was that more than one baseline-format existed in SAS, such as if a 1900-baseline was also sometimes used, then maybe that would explain the distribution.

Kind regards,

Jacob

Re: Date format

RW9 — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:30:28 GMT

Well there is:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000197881.htm

However you need to know what those numbers actually refer to. I would also be careful about changing the option as it may affect other data's representation in the same session.

Re: Date format

Jbraun — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:33:56 GMT

Thanks

Re: Date format

ballardw — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:43:45 GMT

@Jbraun wrote:

Dear SAS users

I have a variable "Birth_date" with dates of birth. The variable containts numbers between 14316 and 36329. As far as I know the SAS date of birth format counts from the year 1960 so that jan 1st 1960 is "1" and so forth.

You might be interested to know that those example numbers will be 3/12/1939 and 6/18/1999 if treated as EXCEL date values which uses 1/1/1900 as it's base date. Perhaps the data base imported data from Excel but did not use or associate a date format with them, or the date format did not carry over from export or however you moved the data into SAS.

Re: Date format

Jbraun — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 19:00:37 GMT

@ballardwthanks, that age span would definitely make a lot more sense. I will of course look for documentation to make sure.