topic Re: Basic question about dates in SAS Programming

Basic question about dates

joaolopes — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:20:10 GMT

Hi,

I have opened a csv file in sas and I have some dates variables in the following format:

19NOV10:00:00:00

25NOV10:10:20:00

26NOV10:13:12:00

etc...

How do I remove the time to it so I get:

19NOV10

25NOV10

26NOV10

etc...

After that I would like to convert the dates to the following:

19NOV2010

25NOV2010

26NOV2010

etc...

How do I do it?

Also, let's say that in a further step the date "25NOV10" is not correct and want it to replace with "25NOV11". How do I do this?

Thanks in advance

Re: Basic question about dates

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:26:50 GMT

Please show us the CSV file as is. Open it with a text editor (e.g. Notepad, but do NOT use Excel!), and copy/paste a few lines into a window opened with this button:

Depending on the data, you may be able to read the date difrectly by using a date informat.

Once a datetime has been read into SAS as such, use the DATEPART function to extract the date from it.

Re: Basic question about dates

joaolopes — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:09:03 GMT

This is an example of some of the rows

"id","date"
1,2010-11-19 00:00:00
2,2010-11-25 10:20:00
3,2010-11-26 13:12:00

Thanks

Re: Basic question about dates

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:13:18 GMT

With data like this, you can easily apply the date informat directly on the text data:

data want;
infile datalines dlm="," firstobs=2;
input id $ date :yymmdd10.;
format date yymmdd10.;
datalines;
"id","date"
1,2010-11-19 00:00:00
2,2010-11-25 10:20:00
3,2010-11-26 13:12:00
;

Re: Basic question about dates

joaolopes — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:30:05 GMT

I'm using proc import and it seems that format is not supported

Re: Basic question about dates

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:35:09 GMT

It's not necessary to use proc import on CSV files; much better to write the data step yourself.