Date:         Tue, 26 Apr 2005 12:03:39 -0700
Reply-To:     greg warnick <greg.warnick@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         greg warnick <greg.warnick@GMAIL.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      SAS date format for reading Sybase date output
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

hi,

I am delivered flat text files from Sybase using SQL Advantage and then
the file gets ftp'd to me.  No problem, until I try to read the dates
in.  SAS seems to have a format for every date you could dream up
except the default one in Sybase: Jan 15 2005.
Note that SAS has WORDDATE., but this expects a comma between the day
and the year.  Since the data that gets delivered changes and the
variables themselves change depending on different factors, I cannot
write a convert or cast statement into the SQL code, just SELECT * FROM
TABELX.
I do get the first line that contains the variable name, but thats all
the metadata that gets delivered.  i would rather process the data in
SAS (than use SQL Server BCP) and am considering using regular
expressions but would rather find a format to use in the input
statement.
Any suggestions, hints, tricks, caveats or otherwise?

Thansk, SAS-L.

Greg