Changing Length of Character Variable

[DeJanae07]

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 

[Shmuel]

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;

[pink_poodle]

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.

[Ksharp]

data have;
set sashelp.class;
run;

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