Scripting Guide - SAS

108 Types of Data Chapter 6
Date-Time Functions and Formats
Use your path variable as you would other variables. The following expression opens the myimportdata.txt
file in the c:/ directory.
Open("$root/myimportdata.txt")
As with getting path variables, omit the dollar sign when setting path variables.
Relative Paths
If you plan to use relative paths in variables, you must set the default directory. Then any path not preceded
by a drive letter is relative to the default directory. Here is an example:
Set Default Directory("c:/users/smith/data");
To return the value of the default directory, use Get Default Directory().
Get Default Directory(); // returns "c:/users/smith/data"
So the following expression:
Open("cleansers.jmp");
resolves as C:/users/smith/data/cleansers.jmp.
File Path Separators
In JMP, the preferred file path format is the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), or UNIX,
format with forward slashes (/) as separators. This means that you do not have to identify the current
operating system in scripts run on both Windows and Macintosh. However, each host still accepts its native
format for compatibility.
You can a convert file path format from Windows to POSIX (and vice versa) using Convert File
Path(). Converting from a POSIX to a Windows path might be useful when you need to output a path to
a file or to another application. The syntax is:
Convert File Path (path, , , );
For example, the following script converts a POSIX path to a Windows path:
Convert File Path("c:/users/smith", windows); //returns c:\users\smith
You can substitute a path variable (such as $HOME) for the path inside quotes.
Date-Time Functions and Formats
A date-time value consists of any portion of a date or time. The value can be seconds (3388594698), a
complete date (such as “Wednesday, May 18, 2011”), the date and time (“05/18/2011 8:18:18 PM”), the
week number (3), and so on.
JMP lets you convert date-time values to common formats, perform arithmetic on the values, and
manipulate the data in a number of ways.