I can't possibly be the first person to have this issue. Maybe I'm just ignorant of an easy function to do this.

Here goes:

I want to make an alpha field to say a date range such as
"01/16/2004 to 02/15/2004" but I have to calculate the months. conceptually I want to do:
((month - 1)|'/'|'16/'|year|' to '| month | '15/' | year)

this is clearly not legal since the output needs to be in alpha and I'm doing arithmatic.

is there a way to do this arithmatic and cast it to char inline? it would make sense to me to do something like

(char(month-1)...)

but that doesn't seem like an option.

Can anyone help me out here?

Something like this?



-DEFAULT &MONTH = 1;
-DEFAULT &YEAR = 2004;

TABLE FILE CAR
PRINT MODEL
COMPUTE MONTH1/I2 =
&MONTH; NOPRINT
COMPUTE MONTH2/I2 =
IF MONTH1 EQ 1 THEN 12 ELSE MONTH1 - 1; NOPRINT
COMPUTE YEAR1/I4 =
&YEAR; NOPRINT
COMPUTE YEAR2/I4 =
IF MONTH1 EQ 1 THEN YEAR1 - 1 ELSE YEAR1; NOPRINT
COMPUTE DATE_INFO/A40 =
EDIT(MONTH2) | '/16/' | EDIT(YEAR2) | ' - ' |
EDIT(MONTH1) | '/15/' | EDIT(YEAR1);

BY COUNTRY
END

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Mabel>,

Thanks Pietro De Santis!

This worked with some minor differences. Rather than a compute I used a define so I could put it in the header. The code was great though... thanks again

George, since you're putting it all in a header, how about just using smart dates for the 2 dates:
HEADING
"TABLE FILE something
do stuff
BY DATE1 NOPRINT BY DATE2 NOPRINT
END
where the dates are formated
DATE/MtDYY , which is very nice looking