TT13
Have a Strange Date? - Create your own INFORMAT to deal with her.
Venkatesan Chakravarthy, Consultant

SAS users often deal with date values. Sometimes we deal with date values such as "December 20, 1999". To an end user or for a report, such date values appear logical, intuitive and informative. Indeed, for some limited purposes even a SAS programmer find s it sufficient to read these dates as literal character fields. Quite often though, we need to calculate the number of days between two dates e.g. number of days exposed to a drug in clinical trials. So the trick lies in reading the above date as a SAS da te value. However, we cannot easily READ a date value in the form "December 20, 1999". While there is the SAS supplied WORDATE FORMAT to write out a date value in the above form, there is no corresponding INFORMAT to read such a date value. This paper dea ls with reading such date values with user created DATE INFORMATS.