topic Re: Long variable name in SAS Procedures

Long variable name

Defense — Sat, 21 May 2016 03:39:57 GMT

Hi,

As I import an excel table with very long column head into SAS via SAS import wizard, the variable names (column heads) are truncated in sas dataset. How can I avoid the truncating?

thanks

Defense

Re: Long variable name

Kurt_Bremser — Sat, 21 May 2016 06:25:45 GMT

SAS variable names are limited to 32 characters. You need to adapt your Excel headers to this limit.

Re: Long variable name

Defense — Sun, 22 May 2016 00:54:59 GMT

Thanks

Re: Long variable name

ballardw — Sun, 22 May 2016 05:26:00 GMT

Note that SAS has something called LABELS to provide nicer text for many uses that can be associated with a variable.

Very brief example:

data have;

x=4;

label x ="The number of candy bars";

run;

proc print data=have label;

run;

Will the text of the label instead of the variable as a column heading.
By default most procedures will use the label (or at least part of it) in output. And Labels can be much longer than a variable name, 256 and can include characters like # ! @$%^&*() and so on.

Re: Long variable name

LinusH — Sun, 22 May 2016 12:47:08 GMT

By default, SAS will use column headers as SAS labels. But the maximum length is 64 chars due to a limitation in the Jet engine. Of course you could expand the label in a later step, but that would be considered a work around.
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/acpcref/67382/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n0msy4hy1so0ren1acm90iijxn8j.htm