topic Date to SAS date in SAS Programming

Date to SAS date

anweinbe — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 15:04:17 GMT

Hi all,

In one table I have a date field called "DATE" that shows up as 20160401. It is type numeric formatted YYMMDDn8.

In my second table I have a date field called "DATE2" that shows up as 20545 (a SAS date) which is type numeric with no format.

I'm trying to join these tables together by customer name (in both tables) and the date fields but I am struggling to convert the dates into similar format before the join. Is there an easy way to convert the YYMMDDn8. and convert it to a SAS date? Perhaps that idea is making this more complicated?

Re: Date to SAS date

Tom — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 15:08:18 GMT

From your description no conversion is needed, both variable have the number of days since 1960. The reason the values look different to you is just because they are being displayed using different formats. YYMMDD vs BEST.

Re: Date to SAS date

anweinbe — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 15:17:16 GMT

Tom,

So I should be ignoring what fields visually looked like when they are dates and SAS will take care of it? Pardon the ignorance here.

Re: Date to SAS date

AMSAS — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 16:26:40 GMT

Hi,
Yes, in your example that is true. The format on the DATE variable just changes the appearance of the variable when output, it's still stored as a numeric (number of days from 1 Jan 1960).

Here's a simple example that might help:

data _null_ ;
	date=today() ;
	date2=today() ;
	format date date7. ;
	put "date: " date "date2: " date2;
	if date=date2 then
		put "date = date2 even if they appear different" ;
run ;

Re: Date to SAS date

ballardw — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 17:34:19 GMT

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Working-with-Dates-and-Times-in-SAS-Tutorial/ta-p/424354 has a PDF with much information about dates.