topic Re: How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format in SAS Programming

How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format

gor1707 — Wed, 31 May 2023 15:08:13 GMT

For example i have dates in character such as "01-JUN-2021", "05MAY2022", "01-11-2020", "12/12/2022", how can i know in which format they are, or what delimiter they have for converting to iso8601?

Re: How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format

Reeza — Wed, 31 May 2023 15:10:10 GMT

Try using ANYDTDTE so SAS will read it in automatically.

https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/vdmmlcdc/8.1/leforinforref/n04jh1fkv5c8zan14fhqcby7jsu4.htm

@gor1707 wrote:

For example i have dates in character such as "01-JUN-2021", "05MAY2022", "01-11-2020", "12/12/2022", how can i know in which format they are, or what delimiter they have for converting to iso8601?

Re: How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format

PaigeMiller — Wed, 31 May 2023 15:15:21 GMT

One of the problems when you get dates like "01-11-2020" is that you can't know, and we can't know, whether this is January 11, 2020 or November 1, 2020. ANYDTDTE will convert them to actual SAS dates, but there's no guarantee that it will pick January 11, 2020 or November 1, 2020 properly. Unless you can go back and ask the providers of the data what "01-11-2020" means (perhaps they have documentation), this is an unsolvable problem.

Re: How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format

Reeza — Wed, 31 May 2023 15:17:29 GMT

Correct, but same issue if doing it manually.

Re: How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format

ballardw — Wed, 31 May 2023 16:10:13 GMT

Read character data into a SAS date (or time or datetime) value with an appropriate Informat. Assign the desired ISO format to that variable.

The issue can be determining the proper informat because there are so many possibilities. Pray that at least the years are all 4-digits or the issue can get pretty ugly.