topic Re: Issue converting Length greater the 230 in XPT c# in SAS Programming

Issue converting Length greater the 230 in XPT c#

selukarchetan7 — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 06:20:19 GMT

Hello All,

I am creating a XPT file from c# by the SAS Guidelines.

I am strucked, in converting Column length to string greater then 230. When i convert Encoding.ASCII "230" length value and store it in a file and when i try to access the file in SAS Universal Viewer Column length which is 230 is converted into 63.

E.g.: Name length = 230 (Actual)

when created XPT file and seen in Universal Viewer it shows Name Length = 63.

How can i overcome this issue.

Note: I am using c# and programmatically generating XPT's.

Please help me out

Re: Issue converting Length greater the 230 in XPT c#

RW9 — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 08:17:06 GMT

XPT (and don't get me started on it), is so ancient even the dinosaurs laughed at how old it was. Really should not be using it for anything in this eon! Its proprietary binary (all the lovely cross OS issues), has limitations all over the show, one of which your hitting here. Character strings can only be 200:

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000466.shtml

(Thats just the first result on google)

I cannot express how much I hate this file format. Use anything - and yes I would even include Excel in there before using XPT. CSV, XML, Json, delimited text, anything!