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SASPhile
Quartz | Level 8

WARNING: INPUT function reported 'WARNING: Illegal first argument to function' while processing WHERE
clause.

 

I want to convert a year to numeric and subset data:

 

data want;

set have;

where input(SUBSTR(trim(Primary_Completion_Date),LENGTH(TRIM(Primary_Completion_Date))-3),best.) >=2015;

run;

4 REPLIES 4
RW9
Diamond | Level 26 RW9
Diamond | Level 26

Please post test data in the form of a datastep!!

 

It takes away the whole guessing part.  What does primary_completion_date look like, is it numeric or character?  If its numeric you don't need any of that:

where year(primary_completion_date) >= 2015;

If its character convert to numeric first:

where year(input(primary_completion_date,yymmdd10.)) >= 2015;
SASPhile
Quartz | Level 8

the date is charatcter string and I'm getting the year from that string "02/08/2015"

RW9
Diamond | Level 26 RW9
Diamond | Level 26

So:

where year(input(primary_completion_date,ddmmyy10.)) >= 2015;
Kurt_Bremser
Super User

If your date is as you posted, your code has to work:

data test;
primary_completion_date = "02/08/2015";
x1 = input(SUBSTR(trim(Primary_Completion_Date),LENGTH(TRIM(Primary_Completion_Date))-3),best.);
run;

Log from that:

27         data test;
28         primary_completion_date = "02/08/2015";
29         x1 = input(SUBSTR(trim(Primary_Completion_Date),LENGTH(TRIM(Primary_Completion_Date))-3),best.);
30         run;

NOTE: The data set WORK.TEST has 1 observations and 2 variables.
NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):
      real time           0.02 seconds
      cpu time            0.00 seconds

As you can see, no WARNING.

So I guess your primary_completion_date is not really what you posted. Could it be that it is already a SAS date (numeric with date format)?

Maxim 3: Know your data.

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