topic Re: Convert text dates and see if two dates are the same in SAS Programming

Convert text dates and see if two dates are the same

Bellefeuille — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 02:18:03 GMT

Good Evening,

im reading in an input file that has dates in text format.

IDAT $ EDAT $ TRDAT $

Idat and TRDat

Both look similar to

Idate	trdate
20170426	20170426

my goal is to compare if the date are identical or not.(1 or 0)

Re: Convert text dates and see if two dates are the same

Reeza — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 03:34:02 GMT

You don't have to convert the to dates to check if they're equal if they look the same. You can check directly.

I would suggest using an INFORMAT to specify the format type - yymmdd8 and then format the date with a date9 format.

Here's some skeleton code:

data have;
informat idat edat trtdat yymmdd8.;
format idat edat trtdat date9.;
input idat edit trtdat;

if idat = trtdat then do;

****whateever you want to do here*****;

end;


run;

Re: Convert text dates and see if two dates are the same

RW9 — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 08:21:14 GMT

You have two text strings therefore:

identical=ifc(strip(edat)=strip(trtdat),1,0);