Formating duration to ISO8601 duration standards

[dmanteigas]

Hi there!

I have a raw database which reports duration in days as a character variable (e.g. 38) and when reading it to SAS I would like to format it in ISO 8601 format (for instance, 38 would be P38D). Currently, I'm doing it manually by creating two additional variables ('P' and 'D') and concatenating them with the duration variable 

VAR1 = cats(P,LENGTH,D)

However, I would like to know if there is another way to do this automatically in the data step without performing the conversion this way, I mean, by automatically applying the ISO8601 format to the character variable.

Regards,

David

[Tim_SAS]

Does this help? http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a003169814.htm

[dmanteigas]

Hi Tim,

Already read it but can't figured out a solution.

Regards,

David

[ballardw]

If your duration is integer days then an alternate solution would be read them as numeric and display with a custom format.

Note: the custom format name couldn't be PD as that is a SAS supplied format.

proc format library=work;
picture p_d
low-high = '000009D' (prefix='P');
run;

data junk;
   do x=1,10,100,1000,10000;
      output;
   end;
run;

Proc print data=junk noobs;
   var x;
   format x P_d.;
run;

The picture could be changed to accomodate decimals but may get more finicky about number of digits displayed.