topic Re: Convert month format to character in SAS Programming

Convert month format to character

eabc0351 — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 13:52:46 GMT

Hello. I am trying to convert a numeric date variable into a character. Code below. Please advise.

*previous step;
data have1; set have;
gap_months=birthdate-admdate;
format gap_months month.;
run;

*This provided me with the difference in months from the birth hospital visit to
the hospital readmission . Now I want to turn the variable gap_months into a character;


I tried the following, it didn't work - any suggestions? thank you;

data want; set have1;
 gap_monthschar=  put(input( gap_months,best.),z2.);
run;

Re: Convert month format to character

novinosrin — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 14:17:43 GMT

More than the code, a sample data of what you 'have' and what you 'want' will help many understand better plz

Re: Convert month format to character

eabc0351 — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 14:36:29 GMT

Yes, sorry about that. I figured it the syntax in the meantime. I was looking for the function month(). This helped me get the month of both dates in a format that I wanted. @novinosrin Thank you for your reply.

Re: Convert month format to character

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 15:18:54 GMT

gap_months is, per definition from the previous step, numeric, so the conversion with the input() function is not necessary.

From your code I infer that birthdate and admdate are SAS dates, and to calculate the month difference between dates, one uses the intck() function:

gap_months = intck('month',birthdate,admdate,'c');

and then

gap_monthschar = put(gap_months,z2.);

both can be done in one step.

Re: Convert month format to character

eabc0351 — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 16:03:15 GMT

Great @Kurt_Bremser . That solution worked, thank you.