Changing date format didn't work

[Solph]

I've a dataset with visit date format being datetime DATETIME20. and informat YYMMDD10.

I just want to have simple format such as 20051031 or 2005-10-31. I've tried several ways to change the format but the data just appeared in all asterisks as **********. I don't know why the usual solutions didn't work on this dataset this time. I thought it was a simple solution . So thanks in adavance.

ID  VisitDate

1   31OCT2005:00:00:00

2   11JAN2006:00:00:00

3   12APR2007:00:00:00

4   18OCT2007:00:00:00

5   10APR2008:00:00:00

[art297]

The field you are inputting is a datetime field, but you only want to keep the date part.  The following would be one way to get what you want:

data have (drop=temp);

  informat temp anydtdtm.;

  format VisitDate mmddyy10.;

  input ID  temp;

  VisitDate=datepart(temp);

  cards;

1   31OCT2005:00:00:00

2   11JAN2006:00:00:00

3   12APR2007:00:00:00

4   18OCT2007:00:00:00

5   10APR2008:00:00:00

;

[Solph]

Thanks a million and for the swift reply. I thought resetting to the date format should work (and it didn't).Didn't realize I needed to create a new variable using the date function. Thanks again.