how to convert char date to sas date , tried many ways. - sas

I have a data which is in one column which has a mix of all data types, formats.
text, numeric and also date.
I have to transpose the coloumn to rows.
When I import the data in to sas 9.3 the dates are turning into a number (char format) and after transpose when I try to convert using the input function it is not giving the correct date.
The observation I am getting is like 41172 in the date column.
How do I convert it?

Think you're confusing data types and formats. The two types are character and numeric.
Dates are all numeric, and are stored as a SASDATE which is the offset from 01 JAN 1960, with each day representing 1.
To have each SASDate be displayed, you must format that variable as a date (eg. date7, ddmmyy etc). That means you first need to use the input function to go from text to numeric (SASDate) then the put function to format it as you want it.
If you're using the input function, you just need to add one of those formats and a put function:
newvar=put(input(var,8.),date7.);
Or you could leave it as just the input() and use this:
format var date7.;
In your data step.

Related

how to read date and time from txt file using sas

I'm very new to SAS and I'm trying to read a txt file that contains date and time. The file is shown in the following figure
I believe I have tried all the possible options that I can think of to read the file but the output is still in numeric form. The following is the code I'm using
data wb_bg_1619;
infile "C:\Users\daizh\Desktop\Ren\SAS\wb_bg_0215.txt" firstobs=3 missover;
informat DATE DATE7. TIME TIME5. ;
input DATE TIME BG;
run;
proc print data=wb_bg_1619;
run;
The output looks like this
You've used an informat to automatically convert a date stored as text into a numeric SAS date format, which is the number of days since Jan 1 1960. To display that in a human readable format, you need to use a regular format. Add the following to the top or bottom of your code:
format date date9.
time time.
;
This changes how the data is displayed to you, but does not change how SAS works with it. As far as SAS is concerned, a date is only a number. You could run the rest of your program without ever using a format and get the right numbers and calculations with it if you wanted to, but that sure makes troubleshooting hard.
To remember the difference between a format and informat:
informats are for inputs
formats are for you

SAS Date Format conversion

I've recently started using SAS Enterprise guide and would like to convert the date "01MAR2014" to "MAR 2014". I've been googling but unfortunately no luck.
I've tried the following however it just returns an
SELECT input(put(StartDate,EURDFMYw.),9.) AS Order_DDD_YY
Does anyone know how to convert this?
If your date is a SAS date, i.e. a numeric with date format applied then you can change the display by using the monyy5. format instead. Note that this will create a character variable that will no longer sort properly in reports/datasets, it will sort alphabetically instead of a date order.
put(startDate, monyy7.) as Order_DDD_YY
Otherwise you can apply the format instead of converting it.

How to convert date in SAS to YYYYMMDD number format

In test_1 table, the my_date field is a "DATE9." format.
I would like to convert it to a pure numeric format (number length 8) which is of the form YYYYMMDD.
I would also like to do this in a proc sql statement ideally.
Here's what I have so far.
Clearly I need something to manipulate the my_date field.
rsubmit;
proc sql;
CREATE TABLE test_2 AS
SELECT
my_date
FROM
test_1
;
quit;
endrsubmit;
FYI: I am finding it quite difficult to understand the various methods in SAS.
To clarify, the field should actually be a number, not a character field, nor a date.
If you want the field to store the value 20141231 for 31DEC2014, you can do this:
proc sql;
create table want as
select input(put(date,yymmddn8.),8.) as date_num
from have;
quit;
input(..) turns something into a number, put(..) turns something into a string. In this case, we first put it with your desired format (yymmddn8. is YYYYMMDD with no separator), and then input it with 8., which is the length of the string we are reading in.
In general, this should not be done; storing dates as numerics of their string representation is a very bad idea. Try to stay within the date formats, as they are much easier to work with once you learn them, and SAS will happily work with other databases to use their date types as well. If you want the "20141231" representation (to put it to a text file, for example), make it a character variable.
Don't.
You lose the ability to use built in SAS functions for date calculations.
SAS stores dates as numbers, 0 being Jan 1, 1960 and increments from there. Formats are used to display the formats as desired for reporting and presentation.

SAS - Convert numeric values to character including dates

I have a need to combine two sas datasets having the same column names but one of the datasets will have a numeric value where the same name in the other dataset are character. I was thinking to evaluate each field with the %isnum function and based on this convert the number to character:
char_id = put(id, 7.) ;
drop id ;
rename char_id=id ;
What I need to know is how do I determine the length of the variable to use in the PUT and what would I do for date fields?
Sounds like you need to analyze your data and see how long things are. Use an obviously too long format (best32.) and then see how long the actual results are, or use max.
For date fields, you need to decide how you want your date fields to look.
date_c = put(date_n,date9.);
That would be the default, but there are literally hundreds of date formats you can choose from.
You can also use proc contents data=myDataStes out=VarDatasets; run; and you will get the list of variables with type, length, format, informat and so on.

converting format (from date to numeric) using SAS

I am working with a dataset in SAS, containing many variables.
One of these variables is a DATE variable and it has a date/time format. It looks like this:
12FEB97:00:00:00
27MAR97:00:00:00
14APR97:00:00:00
Now the thing is that I would like to convert this variable into a NUMERIC format. And I would like to get the following result (based on the previously shown 3 examples):
199702
199703
199704
Do you have any ideas how to do it? I already read through many docs, pdfs etc. but still could not find a proper solution yet.
Thank you very much!
First, you need to extract the date from your datetime variable. You can use the datepart function:
date = datepart(var);
Then, you want to put this variable (which will still be coded as a date number) into a number that you can read the year and month. Do this with putn:
date_as_num = putn(date,'yymmn6.');