Date:         Fri, 8 Jun 2007 13:23:13 -0400
Reply-To:     Peter Flom <peterflomconsulting@mindspring.com>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Peter Flom <peterflomconsulting@MINDSPRING.COM>
Subject:      Reading a weird date format
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Hello

I have an Excel file with a column of dates that are oddly formatted.

e.g.
38 Oct 11-15
38 Oct 19-24
38 Nov 7-12


38 is 1938, the next 3 are the month, the end is a range of dates in the month.  Sometimes the range extends over 2 months

39 Feb 24 - Mar 1



This is a character field in Excel.

I used dbmscopy to convert it to SAS, yielding

e.g.

 38 Oct 11-15

so, then I tried the substr function to get year, month, and startdate and enddate, figuring I could then recombine them.

<<<
data today;
 set kos.presapp;
 year = substr(date, 1,2);
 month = substr(date, 4, 4);
 startday = substr(date, 5,5);
 where date ne '';
run;
>>>

yields less than ideal results (year and month are ok but...)
startday looks like

  ct 11

changing 5,5 to 7,7 yields somewhat better results:
e.g

 1-3

but that's still not good.

date got read as a length 18 character variable.


How does one character yield 3?

How to read this?

TIA

Peter