Multi tool use

formatting date variable doesn't work

I am doing data step using the following code.

data meme;
infile '/home/bronx.txt' dlm='09'x truncover firstobs=2;
length ADDRESS $12. DATE 8. GROSS 5. LAND 8. SALE 6. YEAR 4. ZIP 6.;
format DATE mmddyy10.;
input ADDRESS $ ZIP LAND GROSS YEAR SALE DATE;

run;


Nonetheless, this error always accures:

WARNING: Limit set by ERRORS= option reached. Further errors of this type will not be printed.

1 Answer
1

Looks like you do not understand what SAS formats and informats are for.

A FORMAT is instructions for converting the stored value into text. To go the otther way you need to use an INFORMAT. So if the text in your file looks like 01/01/2016 then you would want to use the MMDDYY informat (or perhaps the DDMMYY informat). If it looks like 01JAN2016 then you will want to use the DATE informat. If you want to value to look like dates when printed then you should also apply one of the many date formats.

01/01/2016

MMDDYY

DDMMYY

01JAN2016

DATE

It also looks like you do not understand how the LENGTH statement works. In a LENGTH statement you need to specify the lengths for the variable, not formats. The LENGTH of a SAS variable is the number of bytes used to store the value in the dataset. Since SAS uses 64-bit floating point format for all numbers you should use a length of 8 for numbers. (You can store numbers using fewer bytes but that just means SAS throws away the lower order bytes when writing to the dataset.)

LENGTH

LENGTH

You might try something more like this:

data meme;
infile '/home/bronx.txt' dlm='09'x truncover firstobs=2;
length ADDRESS $12 ZIP LAND GROSS YEAR SALE DATE 8;
format DATE mmddyy10.;
informat DATE mmddyy.;
input ADDRESS ZIP LAND GROSS YEAR SALE DATE;
run;


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