comparing date formats

[cnilsen]

HI..

I have a limited knowledge of SAS. I am an  AS400 developer who recently jumped to this platform when my company offered me the opportunity.

I am using EG (7.1) and trying to do a left join on 2 tables using a date field.

Table1 has a format of  20OCT2016:00:00:00

Table2 has a format of 20OCT2016

EG wants me to a manual join.. since there is no natural matching columns between the two tables.

I can connect the 2 date columns together and run it without errors, but my results show as NULL values. so the match didnt work

Can I extract(substring) the date only from table1 and do this?

Regards,

Chris 

[Astounding · Accepted solution]

Most likely, what you are seeing are formatted versions of the data values (not the actual values).

If that's the case, the issue is that one table contains a date-time combination but the other is just the date.  Try matching this way:

datepart(table1.fieldname) = table2.fieldname

It's the most likely way to resolve this, but sometimes it takes inspecting the data more closely.

[cnilsen]

Thanks for the help, that worked great!

As I start doing more programming, I'm sure I'll be posting out here quite a bit with questions. 

-Chris N.