topic Re: Converting date to Character in SAS Procedures

Converting date to Character

Benn — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:32:33 GMT

Hi Guys,

I have been trying to converting a date to a string of characters using the PUT function:

DATA WANT;

SET HAVE;

DATENEW=PUT(DATE, $8.);

RUN;

Currently my date is in the YYYYMMDD format. And the output of this code transformed the date into numbers:

19860108 becomes 9504

19860109 becomes 9505

So on and so forth. I think the output transformed the YYYYMMDD format into the SAS date format where 19600101 is zero.

How can I transform the YYYYMMDD into characters while keeping exactly what I see previously?

Thanks guys!

Re: Converting date to Character

art297 — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:59:44 GMT

Does this do what you want?:

DATA WANT;

SET HAVE;

DATENEW=PUT(DATE, yymmddn8.);

RUN;

Re: Converting date to Character

Astounding — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 19:30:49 GMT

You also have the alternative of leaving the data exactly as is. When printing, you can always apply a format so you can view it in a more familiar form. That also gives you flexibility of selecting the format you want for each report. If you would like to assign a default format, you can add the FORMAT statement in the DATA step.