Date Formats

[lancearmstrong1313]

I have a question about date formats.

I have a variable called date in which the year and month of cost data was stored. For example, if date=200601 that means January of 2006. So, the first 4 numbers represent year and the last 2 represent month.

I want SAS to understand that this is a date and represents Year-Month but I'm not quite sure how to do so? I think utimately I'd like for these values to be formatted so that they appear as JAN2006 (instead of 200601). I'm not quite sure how to do this though.
Thanks!

[hlsmith]

Might be a more elegant way to do it, but since your dates will always be 6 digits, you may be able to create a new variable using a substring or numeric placement in your numbers. Grab month and convert, then tell it to add year. Sorry for not providing code.

[lancearmstrong1313]

I want to eventually graph the results (with dates on the x-axis). So right now SAS reads my date variable from low to high so my dates will be in order. However, if I create a new variable from scratch then it will read it alphabetically (April will come before February alphabetically).


What if I want to use PROC SGPLOT to graph costs vs. dates. What if I want the x-axis to ONLY contain tick marks for every 6 months (200601, 200607, 200701, 200707......). Is there a way I can accomplish this?

[hlsmith]

I had been sitting here feeling bad since I pretty much phoned in that last post. The following should work for your first post, just substitute the correct date format you want (lots of them available online).

Data test;
input cDate $6.;

Date = input( Compress( cdate || '01') , yymmdd10.) ;
Format date mmddyy10.;
datalines;
200906
run;
proc print; run;

[lancearmstrong1313]

Haha don't feel bad! I actually found an almost identical code from a google search so thank you very much! I will give it a try

* it worked