Choosing the wanted part of a date

Question

How can I select a part of the date? For example, this date here,2009-01-30T09:50:00, I want to select the 30. How can I do that?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use SUBSTR(char_string, start_position,no_of_chars_to_read) to extract any part of your date

str = "2009-01-30T09:50:00";
sub_str = SUBSTR(str, 8, 2);

Answer 2

SCAN is super good at this:

dtvar = '2009-01-30T09:50:00'

days = scan(dtvar,3,'-T:');

Answer 3

I suggest that when dealing with dates/datetimes you convert them to SAS internal formats. It saves you a lot of pain down the road. When it comes to obscure formatting of datetimes, you can use proc format, picture command to define your specific input. The following works for this case and should work with full dataset.

proc format;/*Define the format*/
    picture mydate other='%0Y-%0m-%0DT%0H:%0M:%0S' (datatype=datetime);
run;

data a;
   full_date_time='2009-01-30T09:50:00'dt; /*The input.*/
   date_part=datepart(full_date_time); 
   day_of_the_month=day(date_part); /*this is the '30' you are after.*/
run;

The beauty of this approach is that after all this you can do all the normal SAS date manipulations that your heart contends.

For more on picture formatting, see http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi31/243-31.pdf