Hopefully an easy one for the experts this morning:
I have a program with column inputs to read a fixed width .dat file of birth certificate data. In years past, dates were listed with zeroes (e.g., 20150101). The newest file replaces the zeroes with spaces (e.g., 2015 1 1), and I am getting several missing values for any variables with dates. I figure this has something to do with SAS interpreting the space as a delimiter within these fields? I thought it would read all of the data between column 132 and column 140 regardless because of using 8. in yymmdd8.
Thanks in advance.
data test;
infile '\\FILEPATH\birth2016.dat' truncover lrecl=4096;
input
@1 transcode $1.
@2 century $2.
@4 birthyr $2.
@6 certno $5.
@63 fname $40.
@103 lname $25.
@128 suffix $4.
@132 DOB yymmdd8.
@140 hourbirth $2.
[REMAINING CODE for 50+ variables]
run;
Assuming the date field is DOB -
1) read it as char type DOB_char $8.
2) replace spaces by zeros: DOB = translate(DOB_char,'0',' ');
3) use input function to get the sas numeric date: DOB = input(DOB_char, yymmdd8.);
4) optionally drop the origin date: DROP DOB_char;
Get the file fixed. "2015 1 1" is pretty much meaningless in terms of any format. There is no standard like that I can think of. You could read in as text, then tranwrd in the 0's, but I would push the work back on the person who cannot supply you good data.
Assuming the date field is DOB -
1) read it as char type DOB_char $8.
2) replace spaces by zeros: DOB = translate(DOB_char,'0',' ');
3) use input function to get the sas numeric date: DOB = input(DOB_char, yymmdd8.);
4) optionally drop the origin date: DROP DOB_char;
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