topic Re: Date time conversions in SAS Programming

Date time conversions

r3570 — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:15:07 GMT

Dear All,

I have a date time format for a variable as 2020-10-22T09:39:00 which is in character format with format as $19. and informat as $19.

Could you please help to convert this value into numeric format which should also be 2020-10-22T09:39:00 ?

I am working in unix environment.

Re: Date time conversions

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 19 May 2021 05:50:56 GMT

Use the E8601DT19. informat to convert the string to a SAS datetime value, and assign the E8601DT19. format to the new variable.

Re: Date time conversions

r3570 — Wed, 19 May 2021 06:22:20 GMT

Hi Sir,

could you please also let me know how to convert the below:

2020-11-03 (in character format) to 2020-11-03T00:00:00 (character format)

and

2020-11-10T09:04 (character format) to 2020-11-10T09:04:00 (character format)

Re: Date time conversions

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 19 May 2021 06:59:40 GMT

@r3570 wrote:

Hi Sir,

could you please also let me know how to convert the below:

2020-11-03 (in character format) to 2020-11-03T00:00:00 (character format)

and

2020-11-10T09:04 (character format) to 2020-11-10T09:04:00 (character format)

You do NOT store date or time values as character in SAS. You need more storage (numbers need only 8 bytes, and for dates you can reduce that to 4), and everytime you need to work with the values you have to convert them first. So you simply don't.

Exporting or printing them in a specific format is done at the time of export/report, and how they are displayed is determined by the assigned display format.