topic Re: Why does my SAS date have the wrong century? in Administration and Deployment

Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

ShelleySessoms — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 17:40:44 GMT

In SAS 9.3 and earlier, the default value of the YEARCUTOFF= option is 1920. This default setting could trigger data integrity issues because any 2-digit years of "20" in dates will be assumed to occur in 1920 instead of 2020. If the intended year in the date is 2020, you must set the YEARCUTOFF= option to a value larger than 1920. Of course, the best alternative is to always specify date values with 4-digit years.

Luckily, SAS makes it easy to change the YEARCUTOFF= option so that it works best for your data. The default value for the YEARCUTOFF= option changed in SAS 9.4 to 1926. This change makes it easier for customers who are still using 2-digit years of "20" to make sure that the date is assigned to 2020. Let's review some of the frequently asked questions that customers ask about how SAS works with 2-digit years.

Find out more about this topic in this comprehensive blog post (including links to the relevant SAS Notes): https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2020/01/10/yearcutoff-date/

Re: Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

ChrisNZ — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 10:47:39 GMT

Context:

One should maybe make clear that this issue arises when dates are read from a string.

When dates are stored as SAS dates, no confusion is possible.

Re: Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

ChrisNZ — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 21:22:38 GMT

Also this interesting tip should be in the programming pages rather than the admin ones, no?

Feel free to alter the post and remove my comments as you see fit. 🙂

Re: Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

ShelleySessoms — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 12:27:58 GMT

Thanks for the insight, @ChrisNZ. I shared your comments and the author feels that everything is covered sufficiently in the blog post.

Since I manage just some of the boards, I like to share content that I think my members might be interested in. I'll leave it to the other community managers to share with their boards, if they want to do so. And this is a SAS Users blog post, so a wide audience has been exposed to it.

Best,

Shelley

Re: Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

ChrisNZ — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 21:55:12 GMT

No worries. As long as everybody's happy... 🙂