topic Re: Date conversion to Character in SAS Programming

Date conversion to Character

buechler66 — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:19:44 GMT

I have a date in my data named actual_dlvry_date. It looks like this:

05/21/2016

ad_dt_char=PUT(datepart(actual_dlvry_date), mmddyy10.); * Convert to a char value ;

I'm attempting to make a character version of the date using this code, but my date value comes out as:

01/01/1960

Any suggestions for what I may be doing wrong here?

Re: Date conversion to Character

ballardw — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:42:38 GMT

Remove the DATEPART.

DATEPART assumes the variable is a datetime which is a count of seconds at heart. Date values are counts of days. So since there are many fewer days when treated as seconds the date portion is often going to correspond to 0 or the base SAS date of 1/1/1960.

Re: Date conversion to Character

JediApprentice — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:59:15 GMT

The datepart function is used to extract the date from a datetime value. Your date is not a datetime value, datetime values look like 01feb94:8:45. To convert your number date to character, you simply need a put statement with no datepart. Like this:

ad_dt_char=PUT(actual_dlvry_date, mmddyy10.); * Convert to a char value ;

Does this answer your question?

Re: Date conversion to Character

buechler66 — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 18:34:29 GMT

Thanks so much. That did the trick. I appreciate your help.