Converting Char formatted Date field to SAS Date

[lora]

I'm almost brand new to both sas and sql - hopefully this is easy!

I've got an effective date field coming from a mainframe data file. It was created in mainframe sas as a character field. Value is yymmdd. I want to convert this to a sas date format to use the various date functions for summing by data by year, quarter, etc...

So far I've tried:

proc sql;
create table datet as
select
input (effdate, yymmddw.) AS date,
input (effdate, yymmddw.) as datef format=date9.
from cd.wcfile (firstobs = 1 obs = 10)
;
quit;

example is input file has character 030514 for May 14, 2003 - but output is date=30514 datef=18JUL2043.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!!
Lora

 

[klaz2002]

What you are missing is a length on the format.

try this:

proc sql;
create table datet as                 
select                         
 input (effdate, yymmdd8.) AS date,
  input (effdate, yymmdd8.) as datef format=date9.
from cd.wcfile (firstobs = 1 obs = 10)
;  
quit;

I hope that this helps you out.
Klaz

 

[ChrisW75]

Yeah, when reading the format documentation (as you obviously have like a good programmer) the W part at the end of the format (or informat in this example) refers to width of the formatted string. The d which appears on numeric formats refers to the number of decimal places.

Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.

 

[lora]

Thanks to both of you...I've had several 'DUH' moments as I'm so new to this! The only other issue i'm having is since its character I get an error in the log that its an invalid data type - but it does do the conversoin. There must be a way to convert character to numeric first to avoid the error. I'll keep hunting for that one!