topic Date Variables: Multiple Date Observations put into one observation with multiple date variables in SAS Programming

Date Variables: Multiple Date Observations put into one observation with multiple date variables

mbrlvlctrl — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 18:18:26 GMT

Hello Community,

I just need help getting ideas on how to approach this and it seems simple, but I can only think of inefficient ways to get this done.

I have information dealing with start and end dates but it is currently set up so that if a person comes in multiple times, it's a separate observation in itself

id start end

1 1/1/10 1/10/10

1 2/25/10 3/1/10

kind of like that.

I want to make it so it looks like this

id start1 end1 start2 end2

1 1/1/10 1/10/10 2/25/10 3/1/10

Any guidance would be helpful.

Re: Date Variables: Multiple Date Observations put into one observation with multiple date variables

Astounding — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 19:26:21 GMT

Does efficiency really matter? You only need to transform the data once. Anyway here's one way (assuming your data is sorted by ID):

proc transpose data=have prefix=start out=start_dates;

by id;

var start;

run;

proc transpose data=have prefix=end out=end_dates;

by id;

var end;

run;

data want;

merge start_dates end_dates;

by id;

run;

You will find that some programming tasks are easier, but they now depend on you knowing how many start and end dates you have.

Good luck.