How to parse strange formatted date

[heyyou1]

The data I am working with has strangely formatted birthdates. For example:

29SEP86:00:00:00
26MAR81:00:00:00
01DEC45:00:00:00

Their birth dates then get plugged into the 

intck("year", birthday, TODAY())

function to find a persons current's age.

How would I parse the above numbers into correct SAS date-time numbers?

[ballardw]

Is that value a character or numeric? It may help to show us the results of Proc contents for that data set if you are not sure.

If the value is character you can read it with a DATE7 informat:

data example;
   x="29SEP86:00:00:00";
   datex = input(x,date7.);
   format datex date9.;
run;

If the value is numeric then it should bea datetime value and you could get the just the date with the DATEPART function:

data example;
   x="29SEP86:00:00:00"dt;
   datex = datepart(x);
   format x datetime16. datex date9.;
run;

This is one of the things I typically blame on poor database programmers using some default that treats dates as date time values. If all of the time components are the same, ie 00:00:00 then the is no meaningful time to deal with.

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@heyyou1 wrote:

The data I am working with has strangely formatted birthdates. For example:

29SEP86:00:00:00
26MAR81:00:00:00
01DEC45:00:00:00

Their birth dates then get plugged into the 

intck("year", birthday, TODAY())

function to find a persons current's age.

How would I parse the above numbers into correct SAS date-time numbers?

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