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noobs
Fluorite | Level 6

Hello EG Users,

I am running into very standard issue of converting variables that represent into format that my code likes. In this snippet, I intend to create just one observation in TemporaryDays dataset that represents February 3 2014, however I need it to be in this format 03FEB2014

data work.TemporaryDays;

input MDay $ 1-9;

MDay = input(MDay, DDMMMYY9.);

datalines;

03FEB2014

;

run;

quit;

Error:

NOTE 485-185: Informat DDMMMYY was not found or could not be loaded.

How do I go about making changes so that observation stored in TemporaryDays is of type date and not character; that matches what it would look like if I were doing:

MDay = '03FEB2014'd;

Thank you very much!

Dhanashree

3 REPLIES 3
ballardw
Super User

Since MDAY was declared character using: Input Mday $ 1-9; then attempting to re-create it as a date-valued numeric in the second line would fail. Either assign an informat before reading or create a new variable. The appropriate informat for data in your example is DATEw.

data ;

     informat Mday date9.;

     input Mday 1-9;

     format Mday mmddyy10.;

run;

noobs
Fluorite | Level 6

WEll , in that case why do I need

format MDay mmddyy10.;

Shouldn't that be same as DATE9.?

In any case, I tried it out and running into no errors but the dataset has observation with missing value in it

NOTE: Invalid data for MDay in line 20 1-9.
RULE:      ----+----1----+----2----+----3----+----4----+----5----+----6----+----7----+----8---
20         03FEB2014

MDay=. _ERROR_=1 _N_=1

Thanks for your suggestions!

noobs
Fluorite | Level 6

Its ok, I see what you are saying now...

Thanks again ballardw Smiley Happy

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