topic Re: Changing date column from CHAR to NUM in SAS Programming

Changing date column from CHAR to NUM

JibJam221 — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 21:20:58 GMT

Hi everyone,

I am having issues changing my DATE column from a CHAR to a NUM so that I can do a join with another table.

The code runs, however when I check the properties, the "accurate_episode_date"'s property is still CHAR.

Here is the code:

data main2; set covid.covid;

format test_date mmddyy10.;

test_date = input(Accurate_Episode_Date,date9.);

run;

Thanks

Re: Changing date column from CHAR to NUM

ballardw — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 21:51:14 GMT

1) you can't change the type of an existing variable

2) you created a new variable test_date that should be numeric and display in the Date9. format. That is the one to look at as your code did not even attempt to change Accurate_Episode_Date.

Re: Changing date column from CHAR to NUM

JibJam221 — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 22:13:09 GMT

Sorry I meant to say that test_date didnt change to a NUM variable. Any suggestions on how to make test_date a NUM var?

Re: Changing date column from CHAR to NUM

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 23:09:36 GMT

Please post the complete log of that step.

Re: Changing date column from CHAR to NUM

Reeza — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 23:25:06 GMT

The format in the INPUT needs to match how the variable currently looks. Since you've said DATE9 that means that your variable looks like 31OCT2021 right now?

Re: Changing date column from CHAR to NUM

Tom — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:34:17 GMT

@JibJam221 wrote:
Sorry I meant to say that test_date didnt change to a NUM variable. Any suggestions on how to make test_date a NUM var?

You cannot change the type of an existing variable. So if TEST_DATE already appeared as a character variable in your source dataset then just trying to attach a numeric format to it or assign a numeric value to it would not change how it was already defined.

Check that TEST_DATE does not already exist on COVID.COVID. If it does then you can use DROP= or RENAME= dataset option to get it out of the way so you can use TEST_DATE as the name of your NEW variable.

data main2; 
  set covid.covid (drop=test_date);
  format test_date mmddyy10.;
  test_date = input(Accurate_Episode_Date,date9.);
run;