@wh95 wrote:
That is unfortunate. Thank you for clearing that up. Is there a way to read in a variable as a date immediately? I have a column that has dates in the '2024-04-25' (yyyy-mm-dd) format, but they are being pulled in as character type. Why am I able to convert into a date type from a number, but not from a character?
There is no "date type" in SAS. SAS only has two types of variables. Floating point numbers and fixed length character strings. Dates are stored as the number of days since 1960. You can attach a format to display those day counts in many different styles depending on your needs. The YYMMDD10. format will display them in that YYYY-MM-DD style.
You can convert a number into a date value in the same variable because they both are NUMERIC variables. But you cannot store a date value in a character variable, only a representation of the date as a string, which is what you seem to be starting with.
If you want to re-use the name of the variable then just add a RENAME statement to change the names back around.
data want;
set have;
date_number = input(date,yymmdd10.);
format date_number yymmdd10.;
rename date_number=date date=date_character ;
run;
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