name of day -DOWNAME9. and weekdate9. formats

[Ronein]

Hello
What is the purpose of  -l in the following code?
What is the difference between DOWNAME9. and weekdate9. formats?

data ex2;
ddate_time=datetime();/*today's datetime value for example*/
ddate=datepart(ddate_time);
day_of_week=put(ddate,DOWNAME9.);
day_of_week2=put(ddate,weekdate9. -l);
format ddate_time datetime20.  ddate date9.  ;
run;

[koyelghosh]

As per the official documentation on PUT function (as here), I am guessing -L is for left align, -C for centre align and -R for right align. Since you are extracting a weekdate (which is a character), it is right aligned by default. I guess you are overriding that behaviour with -L option.

You can do a quick test by substituting -l with -c and -r to see if the alignment changes. If it does then probably that is it. Please let me know the outcome of substituting -l with -c and -r.

Thank you

[koyelghosh]

@Ronein Actually I went ahead and played with -L and -R options myself and the results are as per the documentation. Please see the image below. -L aligns to left and -R to the right.

L and R option difference

[Kurt_Bremser]

Maxim 1: Read the Documentation. Because it's all there:

put() function

downame format

weekdate format