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

[vidyapedii]

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

[PaigeMiller]

The documentation for the LABEL statement is very clear.

https://documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=pgmmvacdc&cdcVersion=9.4&docsetId=lestmtsref&docsetTarget=n1r8u...

[Reeza]

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

[FreelanceReinh]

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, ...)

[PaigeMiller]

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

[Rick_SAS]

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.