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cgray
Fluorite | Level 6

Hopefully an easy one for the experts this morning:

 

I have a program with column inputs to read a fixed width .dat file of birth certificate data.  In years past, dates were listed with zeroes (e.g., 20150101).  The newest file replaces the zeroes with spaces (e.g., 2015 1 1), and I am getting several missing values for any variables with dates.  I figure this has something to do with SAS interpreting the space as a delimiter within these fields?  I thought it would read all of the data between column 132 and column 140 regardless because of using 8. in yymmdd8.

 

Thanks in advance.  

 

data test;
infile '\\FILEPATH\birth2016.dat' truncover lrecl=4096;
input
@1 transcode $1.
@2 century $2.
@4 birthyr $2.
@6 certno $5.
@63 fname $40.
@103 lname $25.
@128 suffix $4.
@132 DOB yymmdd8.

@140 hourbirth  $2.

[REMAINING CODE for 50+ variables]

run;

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
Shmuel
Garnet | Level 18

Assuming the date field is DOB -

1) read it as char type  DOB_char $8.

2) replace spaces by zeros:  DOB = translate(DOB_char,'0',' ');

3) use input function to get the sas numeric date:  DOB = input(DOB_char, yymmdd8.);

4) optionally drop the origin date:  DROP DOB_char;

 

View solution in original post

2 REPLIES 2
RW9
Diamond | Level 26 RW9
Diamond | Level 26

Get the file fixed.  "2015 1 1" is pretty much meaningless in terms of any format.  There is no standard like that I can think of.  You could read in as text, then tranwrd in the 0's, but I would push the work back on the person who cannot supply you good data.

Shmuel
Garnet | Level 18

Assuming the date field is DOB -

1) read it as char type  DOB_char $8.

2) replace spaces by zeros:  DOB = translate(DOB_char,'0',' ');

3) use input function to get the sas numeric date:  DOB = input(DOB_char, yymmdd8.);

4) optionally drop the origin date:  DROP DOB_char;

 

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