Time Informats

From sasCommunity

For a long time, SAS only had one informat for time values. That informat is, of course the TIMEw informat. It processes values of the form hh:mm:ss.ss, where the seconds are optional, but colons are mandatory; that is, hh:mm will work, but hhmm or hhmmss will not.

Now there are two additional time informats, ND8601TM and ND8601TZ. They are documented in an appendix to the SAS XML LIBNAME Engine: User's Guide and are not included in the main informat inventory. ND8601TM handles hours, minutes, and seconds without colon delimiters. ND8601TZ also accepts fractional seconds and time zones.

One oddity is that ND8601TM has a minimum width of 8, even though it has no use for more than 6 characters (hhmmss) and even though it can sensibly parse as few as 2 characters (eg, the expression INPUT('21',ND8601TM.) evaluates to a value of 9PM). So, INPUT('1234x',ND8601TM.) generates an error because "x" is invalid in a time field and INPUT('1234x',ND8601TM4.) generates an error because the width specification (4) is too small.