Why does my SAS date have the wrong century?

[ShelleySessoms]

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/

[ChrisNZ]

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.

[ChrisNZ]

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. 🙂

[ShelleySessoms]

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

[ChrisNZ]

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