The Essential Guide to SAS Dates and Times, Second Edition (2014)

About This Book

Purpose

This book is designed to provide a detailed look at how the SAS date facility works, including an in-depth look at intervals and the interval functions, ISO 8601 date and datetime handling, and the NLS formats and informats. It is intended to serve as both a reference and a teaching tool. Ultimately, this book will allow the reader to become more confident in their daily work with dates, times, and datetimes in SAS.

Is This Book for You?

This book is aimed at beginning to intermediate SAS programmers, or those who work with ISO 8601 data, intervals, and/or reporting in multiple languages.

What’s New in This Edition

This new edition includes updated information to reflect the changes in version 9 of SAS; an expanded discussion of intervals, including the ability to define your own intervals; a section on how SAS works with the ISO 8601 date standards; and a troubleshooting appendix for beginners.

Scope of This Book

This book does not cover the SAS/ETS product, except for an overview of the EXPAND procedure.

About the Examples

Software Used to Develop the Book's Content

SAS version 9.4 (TS level 1M0) was used to produce all the examples in this book.

Example Code and Data

Many of the examples used in this book have accompanying code and data.

You can access the example code and data for this book by linking to its author page at http://support.sas.com/publishing/authors. Select the name of the author. Then, look for the cover thumbnail of this book, and select Example Code and Data to display the SAS programs that are included in this book.

For an alphabetical listing of all books for which example code and data is available, see http://support.sas.com/bookcode. Select a title to display the book’s example code.

If you are unable to access the code through the website, send e-mail to saspress@sas.com.

Output and Graphics Used in This Book

Tables in this book were generated using ODS RTF, while graphics were generated as PNG files directly in SAS using the GPLOT and SGPLOT procedures. Screen captures were used to show the VIEWTABLE displays.

Additional Help

Although this book illustrates many analyses regularly performed in businesses across industries, questions specific to your aims and issues may arise. To fully support you, SAS Institute and SAS Press offer you the following help resources:

• For questions about topics covered in this book, contact the author through SAS Press:

◦ Send questions by email to saspress@sas.com; include the book title in your correspondence.

◦ Submit feedback on the author’s page at http://support.sas.com/author_feedback.

• For questions about topics in or beyond the scope of this book, post queries to the relevant SAS Support Communities at https://communities.sas.com/welcome.

• SAS Institute maintains a comprehensive website with up-to-date information. One page that is particularly useful to both the novice and the seasoned SAS user is its Knowledge Base. Search for relevant notes in the “Samples and SAS Notes” section of the Knowledge Base athttp://support.sas.com/resources.

• Registered SAS users or their organizations can access SAS Customer Support at http://support.sas.com. Here you can pose specific questions to SAS Customer Support; under Support, click Submit a Problem. You will need to provide an email address to which replies can be sent, identify your organization, and provide a customer site number or license information. This information can be found in your SAS logs.