substr

[manya92]

does this code mean ?

death_date = mdy(substr(DateOfDeath,6,2),'15',substr(DateOfDeath,1,4)) ;

[RW9]

Please try using even full sentences.  What do you not understand, have you looked up the functions given in that line?

mdy() function accepts 3 numeric values representing month, day, year.

substr() function cuts out a certain amount of characters from X position in a string for Y number of characters.

This code is creating a death date variable with the day value 15 imputed.  Do note its not a good idea to put a character - '15'  - string in where a numeric is expected, this incurs implicit conversion.

[Kurt_Bremser]

It's sloppy programming. It uses strings where numeric values are expected, forcing SAS to do an automatic conversion, which is never good and often bad.

On the surface, this code makes a SAS date out of a string of 7 characters in the form 'yyyyXmm', where yyyy is a year and mm a month, and X any arbitrary character. Depending on the type and contents of DateOfDeath, this could work, or just get you missing values and lots of NOTEs in the log. 

[ballardw]

It would appear that someone has date values in a string and wants to set all of the same month and year to the 15th of the month. That is the purpose of the MDY function to take a month number (1 to 12) , day of month (1 to 31 BUT SAS will verify the number of days against the specific month) and year value and return a SAS data value.

I would guess that the data dateofdeath was in the form of something like YYYY/MM

[Reeza]

I would also be double checking it. You have month at character 6 and year at character 1
YYYYXXMM -> it's almost unheard of to use this type of date formatting. It's usually YYYYMMDD.