Is it possible to reformat character to date?

[ernie86]

Im trying to reformat column DateA to column DateB. The tricky part is there are characters in the column, ie "Not Applicable", so SAS is reading the whole column as character. I tried many different ways but they don't seem like working. So I wonder if it is possible to reformat date if there are characters in the column. 

Group	DateA	DateB
Group A	4/1/2016	04/01/2016
Group B	5/2/2016	05/02/2016
Group C	8/1/2016	08/01/2016
Group D	10/8/2016	10/08/2016
Group E	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
Group F	5/1/2016	05/01/2016
Group G	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
Group H	6/9/2016	06/09/2016
Group I	Not Applicable	Not Applicable
Group J	9/1/2016	09/01/2016
Group K	1/10/2016	01/10/2016

[Reeza]

You can conditionally execute your code. This could be made a one-liner if you use ifn/ifc and/or if you apply ? to your input format, but I'll let you work those out 🙂

if dateb='Not Applicable' then dateb_converted=.;

else dateb=input(dateb, mmddyy10.);

[RW9]

As Reeza has pointed out, conversion is pretty simple, and just drop the "Not" values.  However I would question firstly what those dates reflect, is it really MMDDYY, or DDMMYY?  Secondly why dates in DateA do not have the padding zero.  Looks a bit fishey if you ask me, I would check the source data.