topic Re: Changing Length of Character Variable in SAS Studio

Changing Length of Character Variable

DeJanae07 — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:07:00 GMT

Changing the length of a Character Variable

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Hello SAS Communities,

I recently used proc import to import data from a .xls file. One of the variables within the data set is a character variable and the desired length is 11 variables long, however, after importing the data into my program the length of this variable is now 12.

Here are the SAS Table Properties that show the variable length for the variable SSN and the proc import statement that I used:

PROC IMPORT
DATAFILE = "&CourseRoot/Study/Data/Source/DATA.xls"
OUT = WORK.DATA
DBMS = XLS
REPLACE ;
SHEET = "Sheet1";
RUN;

Is there any way to change the variable length for SSN from 12 to 11?

Thank you,

De'Janae' Guillory-Williams

Re: Changing Length of Character Variable

Shmuel — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 15:57:43 GMT

You can change length of a variable, but you take a risk of assigning a too short and value might be truncated. The code is:

data want;  
     length SSN <new length>;
 set have;
run;

Re: Changing Length of Character Variable

pink_poodle — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 16:02:58 GMT

Longer is better than shorter, you can just re-set it with a length statement. Make sure that it follows right after the data statement.

Re: Changing Length of Character Variable

Ksharp — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:54:50 GMT

data have;
set sashelp.class;
run;

proc sql;
alter table have
modify name char(20);
quit;