topic Substring issue in SAS Programming

Substring issue

Gil_ — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 14:34:52 GMT

I have a table
Pro sql;
Create table settle4 as
Id,
Datetime,
Substr(put(datetime,16.),12,21) as timestamp
From table1);
Run;

The output is
15544
15595
The data looks
13oct18:02:05:44
13oct18:02:06:35

I would want to extract the hour only

Re: Substring issue

novinosrin — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 14:38:08 GMT

have you tried hour function i,e

hour(datetime)

Re: Substring issue

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 16:09:54 GMT

A datetime value is a count of seconds. Using a simple numeric format will display the raw number of seconds as a string, and the substr() then shows the values you posted. SAS provides functions to extract the date- and timepart, and functions to extract further sub-divisions (eg minutes or days) from those.

You find these functions in the documentation for data step programming on documentation.sas.com.

Re: Substring issue

ballardw — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 19:44:33 GMT

@Gil_ wrote:
I have a table
Pro sql;
Create table settle4 as
Id,
Datetime,
Substr(put(datetime,16.),12,21) as timestamp
From table1);
Run;

The output is
15544
15595
The data looks
13oct18:02:05:44
13oct18:02:06:35

I would want to extract the hour only

This line of code

Substr(put(datetime,16.),12,21) as timestamp

Should generate a message like:

NOTE: Invalid argument 3 to function SUBSTR. Missing values may be generated.

as you are asking for more characters, 21, than would exist (put(datetime,16.) would have a maximum of 16 characters).

Which should indicate that you are doing something incorrectly. Even using a DATETIME16. format you wouldn't want to start at position 12.