convert the char into date

[SAS_John]

Hi, 

I am reading other people's code but did not understand "??" in the following code for char into num conversion. input(strip(AESTDTC),?? yymmdd10.)

Can somebody help me out on this?

Thanks!

[art297]

The ?? in the input statement will result in a missing value (with no note in the log) when the variable can't be input using the specified informat.

Art, CEO, AnalystFinder.com

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

Please the log when you run this example code:

data example;
   mydate = input('9999/99/99', yymmdd10.)    ;
   odate  = input('9999/99/99',?? yymmdd10.)    ;
   realdt = input('2017/10/05', yymmdd10.)    ;
   format mydate odate realdt date9.;
run;

You will get an error message from the first line. The example "dates" of 9999/99/99 are one example of some coding for "missing" in some data systems that must have a value but for some reason do not have the actual value available.

[SAS_John]

Thank you both!

From the result, the day missing values are the first day of the month. Is anyway to define the missing values of both day and month similarly?

Best,

John

[ballardw]

It will help to show us what the values with missing days look like. If your dates actually have delimiter  such as / then the ANYDTDTE informat should work to imply the day of the month when missing is 01.

data example;
   informat datestr $10.;
   input datestr ;
   mydate = input(datestr,anydtdte.);
   format mydate date9.;
datalines ;
2017/01/15
2017/01   
;
run;