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SAS Dates – Converting to a SAS Date

I find it very frustrating when I forget how to do something in SAS that I know I have done before.

In these times of frustration I type into a Google search bar “SAS how do you do this” and am surprised by how complex all the results you get are. While a lot of the support documents and help guides are very useful and thorough, sometimes I just want to see how you use the function or Proc in simple code and don’t have time to read some of the larger documents.That is why I shall be blogging simple SAS guides for often used and sometimes frustrating code problems.

SAS Dates seems like a good place to start.

SAS Date format conversion basics:

• Each unformatted field in a SAS table can be either a number (Blue circle) or Text (red Triangle)
• When working with Dates in SAS you first want to make sure SAS is reading your date as a SAS date.
• SAS Dates are a number representing the number of days since 01Jan1960. So 1 is 02Jan1960 and 365 is 31st Dec1960.
• To convert a numeric field into a sas date use a combination of input and Put, to convert a text field into a SAS date use input.
• A SAS date in raw form will be a 5 digit number (between 1987 to 2233) but when formatted as a date will show a calendar icon

How to use in code:

DatetoText = put(mydate,format)

Numbertodate = input(put(mydate,format),informat);

• The informat is the format of the field that you are reading in.
• This code will work in both code nodes and wizard nodes (such as the query node)

For a list of SAS Informats go here

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/etsug/60372/HTML/default/viewer.htm#etsug_intervals_sect008.htm

For a list of SAS Date Formats go here

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/etsug/60372/HTML/default/viewer.htm#etsug_intervals_sect010.htm

P.s While there are many ways of doing anything in SAS the above ways are my preferred way