topic Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String in SAS Programming

Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

bc123456 — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 15:06:18 GMT

Hi All,

I am currently working with a dataset that has deliverydate field as CHAR 10. I'd like to keep it as a character value, and was able to pull the month out of the string using the following code:

DeliveryMonth= MONTH(input('DeliveryDate'n,MMDDYY10.));

DeliveryMonth is the column I'm creating, however the output is the # for the associated month. Example: 06/01/2020 in DeliveryDate is populating "6" in DeliveryMonth. Is there a way to have DeliveryMonth as "MMM" within this data step?

Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Blake

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

Reeza — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 15:10:02 GMT

deliveryMonth = put(input(deliveryDate, mmddyy10.), monname3.);

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

bc123456 — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 15:27:52 GMT

When I try this, I end up with a single dot in each row.

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 15:28:00 GMT

To @bc123456 and @mklangley : do not use the dreaded name literals, especially not when they're not necessary.

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

Reeza — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 16:09:30 GMT

If your problem is as described, then this does work.

Assumptions:

Variable name is DeliveryDate
Variable is character
Variable is in the format mmddyy consistently.

You can verify your assumptions by running a proc contents on your data set as well as a PROC FREQ on your delivery date column.

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

Astounding — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 16:30:28 GMT

This would happen if, in your many experiments, you already created a variable named DeliveryMonth as numeric. You would have to get rid of it somehow, possibly:

set have (drop=DeliveryMonth);

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

Reeza — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:20:44 GMT

The log would have a message about mismatched types wouldn't it?

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

ballardw — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:14:11 GMT

@bc123456 wrote:
When I try this, I end up with a single dot in each row.

Show your entire data step code with notes from the log. Copy the text from the log including any messages. Paste on the forum into a code box opened using the the </> icon to preserve formatting.

If you use code structure like:

Data test;
   set test;
   <testing code>
run;

Then in one or more previous iterations of that data step you created DeliveryMonth as numeric and SAS won't let you put character values into numeric values. The above Data test; set test; is a very poor idea for new SAS coders to use because you completely rewrite your data every time. So logic errors can remove records or lose variables you did not intend. And a host of more subtle bad things can happen if you recode variable values back to the same variable.

And if the you had initially created a date variable for keeping in your data you would likely almost certainly not need an additional variable but use the MONNAME format with a data value as needed in analysis, reports or graphs. One reason not to use character Month values is that they will not sort properly in reports or graphs. The year would start with April, then August and ends with November.

Re: Extract Month (MMM) from Character Date String

Astounding — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 21:10:28 GMT

There would be some messages ... character to numeric conversion, invalid data.