The Missing Format: QYY

sas has a lot of date-related formats…roman numerals, julian dates, jewish calendars, etc.

today i came across the need to format dates by quarter similar to yyq6. (as in 2008Q3), but instead qyy6. (as in Q32008). i needed to use the dates as variable names, so they have to start with a letter or underscore. since i was doing this in a transpose proc, i could’ve used the prefix='_' option, but that would’ve looked odd (_2008Q3).

so i decided to build a picture format. unfortunately, picture formats don’t have a quarter directive like they do for year, month, etc. so a homebrew method was in order.

data qyyfmt;
    retain fmtname 'qyy';
    do y = 1995 to 2008;
        do q = 1 to 4;
            start=input(catx('q',y,q),yyq8.);
            end = intnx('qtr', start, 0, 'e');
            label = catt('Q',q,y);
            output;
        end;
    end;
run;
proc format cntlin=qyyfmt; run;

done. i could’ve expanded this to all feasible recent and future dates do y = 1900 to 2099;, but that’s an overkill for my current need.