Change a character to time variable

[schwartz]

Hello

I have a character variabel "date" in a data set "test" where they are given as

201212

201312

osv. 

I would like a time variabel so 201212 becomes 12/31/12. How can this be done?

Regards, Søren

[RW9 · Accepted solution]

You have a charater field which represents part of a date.  You want a numeric value which is the SAS interpretation of the date.  You don't say what the default is on Day however, given that you put 31 in the example, I assume you want the last day of the month, so you would combine with a intnx:

data want;
  str_date="201212";
  num_date=intnx("month",input(cats(str_date,"01"),yymmdd10.),1)-1;
  format num_date date9.;
run;