topic Re: Date Formatting Errors with INPUT statement in SAS Programming

Date Formatting Errors with INPUT statement

newgrad — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 20:38:17 GMT

I have a dataset where I have to convert dates (MM/DD/YYYY) from a character variable to a date variable.

After many different attempts, my code is still experiencing errors. Ultimately I want to convert the dates from character to numeric format and restrict my dataset to those observations only with date after 7/1/2014 following this step

the error message is

NOTE: Invalid argument to function INPUT"

code:

data data;

set data1;

newvar= INPUT(oldvar, date9.);

run;

Re: Date Formatting Errors with INPUT statement

novinosrin — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 20:44:19 GMT

So if your dates are in MM/DD/YYYY format, why are you using date9. informat. Shouldn't you be using mmddyy10. infomat in your input function?

Like-

data data;

set data1;

newvar= INPUT(oldvar, mmddyy10.);

if newvar>'01JUL2014'd;

run;

Re: Date Formatting Errors with INPUT statement

ballardw — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 14:54:25 GMT

It is good practice to assign some sort of date format to the result of a date value creation so us humans can see what date SAS resovled the value to.

Sometimes people think there text variable is in a layout such as mm/dd/yyyy but SAS reports errors becaus the values are actually dd/mm/yyyy. Or they are mixed. 05/04/2017: is this actualy May 4 or Apr 5. The ones that do not get an error may give you some hints when you look at them.