convert date type to character and use substr

[ForrestYao]

Hi there,

I am currently encountering a problem, I have an attribute date, the variable is a date type and the format is like 01MAY2018.

I want to use substr to extract only the month ie.May for this attribute for future analysis; however, sas told me that I need to convert data type first, but I couldn't find the way to convert this specific format to a character variable. Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot

[ForrestYao]

Hi there,

I am currently encountering a problem, I have an attribute date, the variable is a date type and the format is like 01MAY2018.

I want to use substr to extract only the month ie.May for this attribute for future analysis; however, sas told me that I need to convert data type first, but I couldn't find the way to convert this specific format to a character variable. Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot

[Ashok3395]

Hi , 

You try your query using the below example.

data x;
dt = symget ('runasofdate');
rndt = cats("'",dt,"'");
call symput ('rndt',rndt);
mnth = substr(dt,1,6);
call symput('m_key',strip(mnth));
run;

Regards,

Ashok Arunachalam

[jebjur]

You can use a combination of the PUT function (converts numeric to character) with the SUBSTR function to pull out only the month from the formatted date value:

data test;
input dt date9.;
format dt date9.;
month=SUBSTR(PUT(dt,date9.),3,3);
cards;
01MAY2018
01JUN2018
01JUL2018
01AUG2018
01SEP2018
01OCT2018
;
run;

[ForrestYao]

Hi there,

Thanks for your reply, it works!

[Astounding · Accepted solution]

Once a variable is defined as numeric, it stays numeric forever.  So when you say it's a "date type" that probably means it's a numeric value on SAS's date scale and cannot be transformed into a character.

You can fairly easily create a character variable, based on the date's value.  For example:

char_mon = put(datevar, monname.);

Or perhaps:

char_mon = substr(put(datevar, date9.), 3, 3);

Here's a reference that might be helpful, depending on what it means to extract the month only:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000201049.htm

[ForrestYao]

Thanks a lot, yeah, using your method successfully extracts only the month part and convert it to the character variable.