How do I convert a character to a date in SAS?

Posted on by Muna Meyer

How do I convert a character to a date in SAS?

There is no such thing as a character date in SAS. You can convert the date to a plain old character string, which is only useful in labels and titles and reports. If you care going to do additional computations or work with the date, you need to leave it as numeric.

How do I change a date to numeric in SAS?

Use the INPUT() function to convert a string to a number. SAS stores dates as numbers, so this function can be used for the conversion. data want; set check; format date2 date9.; date2 = input(date,anydtdte10.); run; Here anydtdte10. is an INFORMAT that tells the function how to interpret the string.

How do I change a character to numeric in SAS?

To convert numeric values to character, use the PUT function: new_variable = put(original_variable, format.); The format tells SAS what format to apply to the value in the original variable. The format must be of the same type as the original variable.

How do I change a character to a date?

You can use the as. Date( ) function to convert character data to dates. The format is as. Date(x, “format”), where x is the character data and format gives the appropriate format.

Is date character or numeric in SAS?

A SAS date isn’t a “standard” numeric or character variable – when displayed it can look like character data but is stored as a number. The date of January 1, 1960, has a value of zero (0) – prior dates are negative numbers, those after have positive values.

How do I change the length of a numeric variable in SAS?

For numeric variables, you can change the length of the variable by using a subsequent LENGTH statement. When SAS assigns a value to a character variable, it pads the value with blanks or truncates the value on the right side, if necessary, to make it match the length of the target variable.

How to convert string to date value in SAS?

Convert the Number to a Character String The first step to create a SAS date from a number is to convert the number into a character string.

  • Convert the Character String to a SAS Date Value The second step is to convert the character string into a SAS date value.
  • Apply a Format to the SAS Date Value

    • How to convert character to numeric?

    Column a: From numeric to character

  • Column b: Unchanged (since it was already numeric)
  • Column c: Unchanged (since it was a factor)
  • Column d: From numeric to character

    • How to convert text to numeric format in SAS?

    SAS has char and num, not ’text’. If you’re using SAS PUT () converts a number to character and INPUT () is used to convert a character to a number. SAS doesn’t allow for the variable to change types so you need to Rename it as well. I use SAS 9, in the dataset view columns, it dose show as ‘Text’.

    What is a numeric date?

    is a value that represents the number of days between January 1, 1960, and a specified date. SAS can perform calculations on dates ranging from A.D. 1582 to A.D. 19,900. Dates before January 1, 1960, are negative numbers; dates after are positive numbers. SAS date values account for all leap year days, including the leap year day in the year 2000.