Question: How do I combine YEAR and MONTH data into a single mm/dd/yyyy date without converting from numeric to character types?
I have date data which needs to be read into SAS. It comes in two columns, YEAR and MONTH. The data looks similar to this:
YEAR MONTH
2012 1
2012 1
2013 10
2012 2
2014 7
The data must be stored in mm/dd/yyyy format. For example, YEAR = 2013 and MONTH = 10 corresponds to 10/01/2013.
I have accomplished this via:
if month = 1 then
date = input(compress("01/01/"||year),mmddyy10.);
else if month = 2 then
date = input(compress("02/01/"||year),mmddyy10.);
...
However, the log gives the following note:
NOTE: Numeric values have been converted to character values at the places given by: (Line):(Column).
I understand that this is being done because SAS stores dates as numeric values since January 1, 1960. The Compress function returns a character value. Thus, the numeric data is being coerced into a character type.
While the above code sufficiently solves my problem, the note implies that date formatting should not be handled in this way (via type conversion).
