How to covert character mmddyy to numeric ?

[YuWeiLee]

Hi everyone,

I want to convert character mmddyy to numeric, here is my data :

Date

03/31/1980 (format$10)

06/30/1980

12/31/1980

I try my best to convert it to YYMMDDN8. , but it still doesn't work. I hope that somebody could help me to solve this problem.

Many thanks.

[Kurt_Bremser]

You have an MDY order in the date, so use the mmddyy10. informat.

[Astounding]

You must create a new variable:

data want;
set have;
newvar = input(date, mmddyy10.) ;
format newvar yymmddn8.;
run;

If you want to keep the original variable name, you could add:

drop date;
RENAME newvar = date;

[hashman]

As @Kurt_Bremser and @Astounding have pointed out, MMDDYY10. is the correct informat in this situation.

However, if in doubt, you can use the ANYDTDTEw. informat with a sufficiently long w, which is quite darn good at recognizing various character date patterns with a garden variety of delimiters used. For example, run this step for a demo:

data _null_ ;                                            
  retain dlmstr " ~!#$%^&*()-_=+[]{}\|;:.<>?" ;          
  length cdate $ 10 ;                                    
  do i = 1 to length (dlmstr) ;                          
    cdate = catx (char (dlmstr, i), "09", "11", "2001") ;
    ndate = input (cdate, anydtdte10.) ;                 
    put cdate ndate yymmdd10. ;                          
  end ;                                                  
run ;                                                 

Kind regards

Paul D.