Parsing a Date/Time

[steppermotor]

I'm trying to parse dates and times in sas.

So for instance I'd like to be able to parse this date 1/20/2012, I tried substr to get what I'm looking for along the lines of:

Month = substr(Date, 1,1);

Day = substr(Date,3,4);

Year = substr(Date,6,9);

This did not work

I would also like to parse time as well: 5:00:00 PM, it seems that substr doesn't work on this as well.

such that I'd get

Hour = 5

Minute = 0

Any suggestions?

[data_null__]

The third argument to substr is LENGTH.  You would do better with SCAN function.  Or better still read the dates and times and SAS dates and times then you get a suite of very nice functions to do all kinds if things.  Like pick out the day month or year.

[SteveNZ · Accepted solution]

Depends if number is stored as SAS date with a format on it. If it's stored as a character string then:

data want ;

length day month $2 year $4 ;

set have ;

day = scan(date,2,'/') ;

month = scan(date,1,'/') ;

year = scan(date,3,'/') ;

run ;

If as a date then:

data want ;

set have ;

day = day(date) ;

month = month(date) ;

year = year(date) ;

run ;

Similarly:

data want ;

set have ;

hour = hour(time) ;

minute = minute(time) ;

run ;

data want ;

     length hour minute $2 ;

set have ;

hour = scan(time,1,':') ;

minute = scan(time,2,':') ;

run ;

[steppermotor]

SteveNZ,

Thanks for your response the code you provided work well. It accomplished what I needed it to.