How can I make a character variable equal to the formatted value of a numeric variable for arbitrary SAS formats?

Question

If I have a numeric variable with a format, is there a way to get the formatted value as a character variable? e.g. I would like to write something like the following to print `10/06/2009` to the screen but there is no `putformatted()` function. data test; format i ddmmyy10.; i = "10JUN2009"d; run; data _null_; set test; i_formatted = putformatted(i); /* How should I write this? */ put i_formatted; run; (Obviously I can write `put(i, ddmmyy10.)`, but my code needs to work for whatever format `i` happens to have.)

Answer 1

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but SAS stores all date values as the number of days since 1/1/1960 and the informat ANYDTDTEw. can handle almost any format of date (and time) value being read, and extract the date.

So here is an example:

data raa;

options datestyle=DMY; /* otherwise 10-6-09 is ambiguous in the 4th dataline */

format i_formatted ddmmyy10.;

informat i anydtdte21.;

input i ;

i_formatted=i;

datalines;

10JUN2009

20090610

10JUN2009 15:33:20

10-6-09

;

run;