topic Re: Increasing of SAS variable name length in SAS Programming

Increasing of SAS variable name length

bmsampath — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 10:19:02 GMT

Hi All,

As far as I know, we can have maximum 32 chars as variable name length.

Is there any option/any way to increase the length?

Currently we extract the data from source database where we have variable name length more than 32 chars.

We want to preserver the same name in our platform.

Could you please suggest a solution for this?

Thanks,
Sampath

Re: Increasing of SAS variable name length

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 10:53:30 GMT

You can put the longer names into variable labels.

More than 32 characters are not possible in SAS, as there is only place for 32 characters in the SAS dataset file structure (among other things).

Re: Increasing of SAS variable name length

PeterClemmensen — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 11:00:49 GMT

what kind of source database?

There has been a few suggestions to workarounds in here, among others in this thread:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Data-Management/Dealing-with-32-character-restrictions/td-p/100033

Re: Increasing of SAS variable name length

RW9 — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 12:17:44 GMT

Variable names are used in programming, is the expectation that programmers will need to type in variable names of > 32 characters each time, sounds like a massive waste of resources. I remember working with oracle tables, and that is a real pain typing. You do have labels where long text can be put, so as to identify the columns, that would be the ideal solution. You can also use named variable 'xyx'n, however that is horrendous and shouldn't be used unless absolutely necessary. Me, I would shrink all the variable names down.

Re: Increasing of SAS variable name length

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 12:37:05 GMT

Concur. Some DB designers need to be reminded that they are not Leo Tolstoy.