Date Conversion using datapart

Batta — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:49:29 GMT

Hi SAS experts,

I was routinely converting DATE given in the format:

Number ID	Old_Format
1	12MAR2025:00:00:00.000
2	17MAR2025:00:00:00.000

using

proc sql;

select datepart(Old_Format) as New_Format format=mmddyy10.

from DATASET;

And that was working well, but suddenly I've started receiving the following error:

ERROR: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the dataset DATESET. Either the data contains characters that are not representable in the new encoding or truncation occurred during transcoding.

I am not able to see what changed.

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thank you very much for your time.

Batta

Re: Date Conversion using datapart

Tom — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:57:17 GMT

Either the data being read has changed and it now has characters that cannot be converted into the encoding being used by the SAS session.

Or you switched to a new SAS session that is using a different setting of the ENCODING system option.

Check the ENCODING system option. Check the encoding of the dataset you are reading from.

%put ENCODING=%sysfunc(getoption(encoding));
proc contents data=DATASET;
run;

topic Date Conversion using datapart in SAS Programming

Date Conversion using datapart

Re: Date Conversion using datapart