Date / Time Formatting Issue

[Arsene83]

Hello,

I have a problem with DATE in SAS.

I have DATE in my table

when i change the format of this date (Format AUGDT DATE9.;)

I get only ****** (9999-12-31)

What is all about?

[RW9 · Accepted solution]

Dates and times are stored a numbers from a certain time point.  AUGDT you give is a datetime variable.  Hence the number stored behind the scenes is a datetime amount from a certain time.  If you then try to format this larger number as a smaller date it is far outside the proper date number range hence you get *****.

You need to split the date part of the datetime out, then format that, eg;

data want;
  set have;
  mydate=datepart(augdt);
  format mydate date9.;
run;

Run this coe for instance, then look at the values in show_actual_value variables, you can see the difference:

data test;
  augdt="01JAN2016 14:15"dt;
  show_actual_value_dt=augdt;
  d9fmt=datepart(augdt);
  show_actual_value_d=d9fmt;
  format augdt datetime. d9fmt date9.;
run;