topic Re: Changing month-year variable from character to date format in SAS Programming

Changing month-year variable from character to date format

ama220 — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:18:58 GMT

I concatenate separate month and year variables into a single month-year variable, but the resulting variable is in a character format. I am trying to convert that into a SAS date variable to be able to calculate intervals with other date variables.

I am successful in the first step, but unable to get the month-year variable into a SAS date format. Below are the error I am getting and the SAS output. Any help would be much appreciated.

Data two;

set one;

date=cats(aamn, aayear);

put date= ;

format date mmyy7.; run;

ERROR 48-59: The format $MMYYS was not found or could not be loaded.

Obs	date	AAMN	AAYEAR
1	32003	3	2003
2	12003	1	2003

Re: Changing month-year variable from character to date format

Astounding — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:36:54 GMT

A month and a year is not enough to convert to a SAS date. Dates in SAS refer to a specific day. If you are willing to use the first day of the month, you could use:

sasdate = input( cats(aamn, '01', aayear), mmddyy8.);

format sasdate yymmdd10.;

Re: Changing month-year variable from character to date format

ballardw — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:49:50 GMT

or maybe

sasdate= mdy(aamn,1,aayear);

format sasdate mmyyd.;

Re: Changing month-year variable from character to date format

ama220 — Mon, 14 May 2018 15:20:30 GMT

Thank you, your code worked for me.

Re: Changing month-year variable from character to date format

ama220 — Mon, 14 May 2018 15:22:58 GMT

Thanks, your code is great. Because I needed to limit to the month and year, I found the other code more appreciate to my needs. I really appreciate your help.