topic Re: Another date calculation SAS in SAS Programming

Another date calculation SAS

Argonious — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 11:33:57 GMT

Hi,

I have this format of a birth date : 06FEB81:00:00:00 and from this I have to calculate the age of the person. How I have to format this in order to be able to use it and then what? Thanks in advance!

Re: Another date calculation SAS

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 11:59:01 GMT

Is this value stored as character or as a SAS datetime value (numeric, with a datetime format)?

Re: Another date calculation SAS

Argonious — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 12:04:11 GMT

Datetime. the informat is ANYDTDTM40.

Re: Another date calculation SAS

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 12:10:18 GMT

Then you can use the intck function:

age_in_years = intck('dtyear',date_of_birth,datetime());

Re: Another date calculation SAS

Argonious — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 12:14:50 GMT

I have my answer! Thank you very much! I tried to use this function earlier, but was doing it wrong. Now it works fine. Thanks again!

Re: Another date calculation SAS

ballardw — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 15:44:53 GMT

Note that what you see is a pet peeve of mine, which seems to come from some defaults and/or lazy programming in some applications: storing DATE values as DATETIME. If your data, or your use, has not actual need of the time component you can reduce the variable to only date values using: Date = datepart(datetimevariable); (you could use the same variable as the result) and assign appropriate format for display.

Otherwise in the INTCK and INTNX functions when using a period like 'year' or 'month' you preface the period with 'dt' to tell SAS the value is a date time, hence the 'dtyear'

Re: Another date calculation SAS

mkeintz — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 16:02:15 GMT

Pet Peeve yes. But ...

Elvis has left the building

Re: Another date calculation SAS

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 17:05:17 GMT

On top of what @ballardw said, date values can be stored in 4-byte numeric variables, while datetimes need all 8 bytes of the default numeric length.