best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step?

DDutton — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 19:58:16 GMT

Hi Data Step Programmers,

I'm trying to do something which I thought could be solved with a simple function call, but I've searched and searched for a function to do this and have come up empty so far.

I have 3 numeric variables: year, month and day

I want to determine that they correspond to a valid date, without getting notes such as the below. I need something like MVALID or NVALID, but for a date, not a member name or variable name. Surely this has been solved before! Ideas?

I'm running SAS 9.4 M3, OS WX64_SV, .

62 data _null_;
63 year=2012;
64 month=2;
65 day=30;
66 date=mdy(month,day,year);
67 date2=input(put(year,4.)||put(month,z2.)||put(day,z2.),yymmdd8.);
68 put date=date7. date2=date7.;
69 run;

NOTE: Invalid argument to function MDY(2,30,2012) at line 66 column 7.
NOTE: Invalid argument to function INPUT at line 67 column 8.
date=. date2=.
year=2012 month=2 day=30 date=. date2=. _ERROR_=1 _N_=1
NOTE: Mathematical operations could not be performed at the following places. The results of the operations have been set to
missing values.
Each place is given by: (Number of times) at (Line):(Column).
1 at 66:7 1 at 67:8

Re: best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step?

Astounding — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 20:04:05 GMT

Using the DATE2= variation, see if you can suppress messages by adding ?? in the right place:

date2=input(put(year,4.)||put(month,z2.)||put(day,z2.), ?? yymmdd8.);

Re: best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step?

DDutton — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 20:08:36 GMT

So embarrassed! I forgot all about the ? and ?? modifiers!

Thanks for the quick reminder!

topic best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step? in SAS Programming

best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step?

Re: best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step?

Re: best way to validate a year, month, day combination in a DATA step?