Process irregular date time in SAS

[Ginny_Han]

Dear all,

I am new to SAS have a question regarding the processing of date time in SAS. My data variable is formatted as follows:

1920/11/1 0:00	
1920/11/21 0:00
1920/5/15 0:00
1920/8/27 0:00	
1921/7/14 0:00
1921/7/26 0:00	
1921/8/2 0:00	
1922/2/12 0:00	
1922/2/22 0:00	
1923/11/1 0:00	
1923/12/3 0:00	
1923/2/13 0:00

So they are of irregular lengths and as I understand they do not fit any of the SAS built-in format. They do not have "0"s before or behind the single-digit months or dates.

The result I am expecting is to 1) get rid of the last 5 digits of the clock time; 2) transform the date variable into standard format and then SAS date values (days comparing with Jan/01/1960) and 3) generate 2 variables that display the month and day of the date variable in readable format (but still calculatable).

Example:

Original date variable: 1921/7/14 0:00

Converted into 1921/07/14 which is about negative sth SAS date value

monthvar: 1921/07

datevar: 1921/07/21

Not really sure how to achieve that, especially with the irregular format. Please help! Thanks a lot!

Ginny Han

[Tom · Accepted solution]

Are you asking how to change your existing strings into date values?  If so you are looking for an INFORMAT, not a format.  Since you don't care about the time of day part just ignore it.  Once you have a date value you can use any of the many SAS formats that display dates. Like YYMMDD.

data want ;
  set have ;
  date=input(scan(date_string,1,' '),yymmdd10.);
  format date yymmdd10. ;
run;

Obs      date_string            date

  1    1920/11/1 0:00     1920-11-01
  2    1920/11/21 0:00    1920-11-21
  3    1920/5/15 0:00     1920-05-15
  4    1920/8/27 0:00     1920-08-27
  5    1921/7/14 0:00     1921-07-14
  6    1921/7/26 0:00     1921-07-26
  7    1921/8/2 0:00      1921-08-02
  8    1922/2/12 0:00     1922-02-12
  9    1922/2/22 0:00     1922-02-22
 10    1923/11/1 0:00     1923-11-01
 11    1923/12/3 0:00     1923-12-03
 12    1923/2/13 0:00     1923-02-13

[Ginny_Han]

Hi Tom,

Thank you very much for your swift solution. It worked perfectly. Never considered the possibility of using the -scan- function. Thought I should start with eliminating some digits from the end.