topic Formatting fields in SAS Procedures

Formatting fields

brophymj — Fri, 15 May 2015 08:43:45 GMT

I am trying to change a date which is held in a string and of the format 01 DEC 2012 to a SAS date. Is this easy to do?

Also, I have a character field holding number which I would like to convert to number formats. i.e. 1,769 as a character field of length 10.

RW9 — Fri, 15 May 2015 08:50:24 GMT

Yes, input reads text and converts to numeric (dates and times are actually numbers), put does the reverse so:

data want;

set have;

new_date=input(compress(string_date),date9.); /* Compress as you have blanks */

new_num=input(text_num,best.);

format new_date date9.; /* apply format, otherwise you will see number of days since a date in the past */

run;

brophymj — Fri, 15 May 2015 08:57:05 GMT

Thanks rw9, that works for the dates. In the case of a the number it's not working. My number is currently a string of the form:

1,569

104

1,333

and so on. It's working for the numbers with commas but not the other ones.

RW9 — Fri, 15 May 2015 09:08:51 GMT

Ah, you need to use the comma format then:

new_num=input(text_num,comma8.);

All formats can be found in the online help: