Date:         Fri, 7 Jul 2006 06:50:44 -0400
Reply-To:     Jim Groeneveld <jim2stat@YAHOO.CO.UK>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Jim Groeneveld <jim2stat@YAHOO.CO.UK>
Subject:      Re: date validation
Comments: To: jeli0703@HOTMAIL.CO.UK

Hi Jeli,

I don't quite understand what you are saying. You have two dates as
character fields and the rest as numeric fields. So far so good if with
numeric you mean the number of days since 01jan1960 and not a number which
contains a recognizable day, month and year part.

Next you say your QC has to make sure the dates are all of the format
DDMMYY10. That is what I don't understand: dates are stored as either
character values (with a certain format, like DDMMYY10.) or numeric values
without a format, to be presented with _any_ format, like DDMMYY10. The
last storage form is best: N of days since 01jan1060, stored in 8 bytes
(the default for numeric values). You can make direct calculations with
these dates.

So maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on what your QC actually
demands for date fields.

Regards - Jim.
--
Jim Groeneveld, Netherlands
Statistician, SAS consultant
home.hccnet.nl/jim.groeneveld


On Fri, 7 Jul 2006 03:31:07 -0700, jeli0703@HOTMAIL.CO.UK wrote:

>Was wondering if anyone can help my friday mind block
>
>I have a dataset with a number of variables in it, some of which are
>dates.
>
>However 2 of the date variables are in character format whilst all the
>others are numeric, thus i can assume that if it was incorrect it would
>be .,
>
>i need to pass it through a quality check to make sure that the dates
>are in the correct format ddmmyy10. and if they fall outside todays
>date then suspend that observation otherwise good data.
>
>any help??