How to convert different type of character date into ISO8601 format

[gor1707]

For example i have dates in character such as "01-JUN-2021", "05MAY2022", "01-11-2020", "12/12/2022", how can i know in which format they are, or what delimiter they have for converting to iso8601?

[Reeza]

Try using ANYDTDTE so SAS will read it in automatically.

https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/vdmmlcdc/8.1/leforinforref/n04jh1fkv5c8zan14fhqcby7jsu4.htm

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@gor1707 wrote:

For example i have dates in character such as "01-JUN-2021", "05MAY2022", "01-11-2020", "12/12/2022", how can i know in which format they are, or what delimiter they have for converting to iso8601?

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[PaigeMiller]

One of the problems when you get dates like "01-11-2020" is that you can't know, and we can't know, whether this is January 11, 2020 or November 1, 2020. ANYDTDTE will convert them to actual SAS dates, but there's no guarantee that it will pick January 11, 2020 or November 1, 2020 properly. Unless you can go back and ask the providers of the data what "01-11-2020" means (perhaps they have documentation), this is an unsolvable problem.

[Reeza]

Correct, but same issue if doing it manually.

[ballardw]

Read character data into a SAS date (or time or datetime) value with an appropriate Informat. Assign the desired ISO format to that variable.

The issue can be determining the proper informat because there are so many possibilities. Pray that at least the years are all 4-digits or the issue can get pretty ugly.