topic Re: Character variable truncated at the 5-digit in SAS Programming

Character variable truncated at the 5-digit

joon1 — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 21:47:18 GMT

Dear Madam/Sir,

I created a character variable as below.

if naics in (5412,5413,5417,5418,5414,54161,54162,54169,54191,54193,54199,54192,54194) then IO='5412OP';

However, variable name is truncated at the 5-digit after SAS operation as below.

IO Frequency Percent CumulativeFrequency CumulativePercent

5412O

126

0.24

46240

89.60

It will be highly appreciated if you can advise me how to avoid this variable truncation problem.

Thanks

Joon1

Re: Character variable truncated at the 5-digit

PaigeMiller — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 21:51:42 GMT

Character variables have a specific length (which can be different for each character variable). Your character variable was created to have a length of 5, and so a six character value will be truncated to five characters.

You don't show the entire data step where this variable IO is created, however, you need to specify the length so that the longest string that will occur in your data can fit.

So when you create such a data set, you can start with

data mydataset;
     length io $ 6;
     set ...;
/* Other data step commands go here */
run;

Re: Character variable truncated at the 5-digit

joon1 — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:06:27 GMT

Thank you for your kind help, PaigeMiller. It is straightforward, but I couldn't find a relevant posting. Have a great week.

Joon1