topic Re: Reading in Date: MDDYYYY in SAS Programming

Reading in Date: MDDYYYY

pchappus — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 16:12:16 GMT

Is the only way to read in a date that comes through with varying lengths for the month is to read it in as a string first and then change it to a date once it is read in?

Thanks,

Re: Reading in Date: MDDYYYY

novinosrin — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 16:13:50 GMT

Can you post an example of what your values are to avoid assumptions

@pchappus wrote:

Is the only way to read in a date that comes through with varying lengths for the month is to read it in as a string first and then change it to a date once it is read in?

Thanks,

Re: Reading in Date: MDDYYYY

PeterClemmensen — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 16:14:26 GMT

Post an example please

Re: Reading in Date: MDDYYYY

Reeza — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 16:20:49 GMT

@pchappus wrote:

Is the only way to read in a date that comes through with varying lengths for the month is to read it in as a string first and then change it to a date once it is read in?

Thanks,

Nope.

Re: Reading in Date: MDDYYYY

ballardw — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:26:04 GMT

I read a fair amount of data from CSV files with a data step that usually contains one or more date variables. Unless by "varying lengths for the month" you mean Jan Janu etc then the mmddyy10. informat handles most variations nicely except for a 6 digit without / delimiters.

data example;
   informat date mmddyy10.;
   input date;
   format date date9.;
datalines;
01/01/2019
1/1/2019
01/1/2019
1/01/2019
01012019
1012019
112019
;
run;

All except the last value will return 01JAN2019. The last assumes the year is only 2 digits because that 6 digit is subject to way to many interpretations.

Re: Reading in Date: MDDYYYY

pchappus — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:32:47 GMT

I actually ended up getting it to work. I used MMDDYY8. and it seemed to realized if the month was a Jan-Sept and added the leading zero.