topic Re: How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ? in SAS Programming

How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ?

vidyapedii — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:08:27 GMT

How many characters can be used in a label?
a. 96
b. 200
c. 256
d. 32,767

sas prep guide answer is 32,767,

but everywhere i searched l it is 256

Re: How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ?

PaigeMiller — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:11:55 GMT

The documentation for the LABEL statement is very clear.

https://documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=pgmmvacdc&cdcVersion=9.4&docsetId=lestmtsref&docsetTarget=n1r8ub0jx34xfsn1ppcjfe0u16pc.htm&locale=en

Re: How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ?

Reeza — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:14:38 GMT

Which prep guide and what version? Did you check the errata page for an issue?

Re: How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ?

FreelanceReinh — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:28:58 GMT

Hi @vidyapedii,

Also, the context of the question is relevant: If "label" means a formatted value in a format definition, then 32,767 is correct, whereas a variable label and a data set label have a maximum length of 256. (In the context of graphics there are axis labels, tick mark labels, ...)

Re: How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ?

PaigeMiller — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:33:35 GMT

So, @vidyapedii, following up on the point by @FreelanceReinh, what is the exact wording of the question?

Re: How many characters can be used in a label? 256 or 32767 ?

Rick_SAS — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 22:52:44 GMT

I, too, prefer the doc, but you can also write a program to experiment/validate. Here is a program that makes a string of length N and puts it into a macro variable (which also has a maximum length). If you use this value in the LABEL statement to set a variable label, you can see whether it works for 257 length:

%let N = 257;
data _NULL_;
length L $&N;
L = subpad("A",1,257);
call symput("lbl", L);
run;

data Want;
label A = "&lbl";
a = 1;
run;

For this program, you get the following WARNING:

WARNING: Label value for variable A has been truncated to a length of 256
bytes.