SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9, Third Edition

Reading Dates and Times with Informats

Overview

You use SAS date and time informats to read date and time expressions and convert them to SAS date and time values. Like other SAS informats, date and time informats are composed of

• an informat name
• a field width
• a period delimiter.

SAS informat names indicate the form of date expression that can be read using that particular informat. Here are some examples of common date and time informats:

• DATEw.
• DATETIMEw.
• MMDDYYw.
• TIMEw.

As you know, there are several ways to represent a date. For example, all the following expressions represent the date October 15, 1999. Each of these common date expressions can be read using the appropriate SAS date informat. ...