topic Re: Concatenate Char to Formatted Date in SAS Programming

Concatenate Char to Formatted Date

prolifious — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 03:13:29 GMT

Hi,

I'm having trouble keeping a date format when concatenating to a char.

i want to attach a char variable to yesterday's date, for example:

abc_20180416.

here is the code I made:

data temp0;

yest =today() -1; format yest yymmddn8.;

var1='abc_';

var2= cat(var1,yest);

run;

proc print data=temp0 (keep=yest var2);

run;

The result is:

yest var2

20180416 abc_21290;

I've tried a few different things, but can't seem to pin down how to get var2= abc_20180416.

Any tips out there?

Thanks

Re: Concatenate Char to Formatted Date

Astounding — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 03:33:12 GMT

Here's the statement that creates VAR2:

var2= cat(var1,yest);

Try it this way instead:

var2= cat(var1,put(yest, yymmddn8.));

Re: Concatenate Char to Formatted Date

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 06:51:16 GMT

The crux behind this:

data temp0;
format yest yymmddn8.;
yest = today() - 1;
var1 = 'abc_';
var2 = cat(var1,yest);
run;

is that yest is a numeric variable, while cat() is a string function; so you force SAS to do an automatic conversion from numeric to character, and in such automatic conversions, no formats are applied, and you get the raw value (days from 1960-01-01 to yesterday) appended.

@Astounding's solution prevents this.

Hint: never allow automatic type conversions in your programs (you'll find them by the NOTEs they cause). See my Maxims 31 & 25. Take control.

Re: Concatenate Char to Formatted Date

prolifious — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 12:15:10 GMT

it works. thank you very much for your help here!

Re: Concatenate Char to Formatted Date

prolifious — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 12:15:58 GMT

Thank you, Kurt. These maxims are great! Good reading I'll take up later on. Thanks again for your direction.