topic Re: Is it possible to reformat character to date? in SAS Procedures

Is it possible to reformat character to date?

ernie86 — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 21:59:02 GMT

Im trying to reformat column DateA to column DateB. The tricky part is there are characters in the column, ie "Not Applicable", so SAS is reading the whole column as character. I tried many different ways but they don't seem like working. So I wonder if it is possible to reformat date if there are characters in the column.

Group	DateA	DateB
Group A	4/1/2016	04/01/2016
Group B	5/2/2016	05/02/2016
Group C	8/1/2016	08/01/2016
Group D	10/8/2016	10/08/2016
Group E	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
Group F	5/1/2016	05/01/2016
Group G	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
Group H	6/9/2016	06/09/2016
Group I	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
Group J	9/1/2016	09/01/2016
Group K	1/10/2016	01/10/2016

Re: Is it possible to reformat character to date?

Reeza — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 22:19:26 GMT

You can conditionally execute your code. This could be made a one-liner if you use ifn/ifc and/or if you apply ? to your input format, but I'll let you work those out 🙂

if dateb='Not Applicable' then dateb_converted=.;

else dateb=input(dateb, mmddyy10.);

Re: Is it possible to reformat character to date?

RW9 — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 08:40:59 GMT

As Reeza has pointed out, conversion is pretty simple, and just drop the "Not" values. However I would question firstly what those dates reflect, is it really MMDDYY, or DDMMYY? Secondly why dates in DateA do not have the padding zero. Looks a bit fishey if you ask me, I would check the source data.