As @RW9 writes - and I coudn't agree more - and Interface contract is a MUST and anything else is simply unprofessional when it comes to regular data exchange between applications and systems.
I've been this year in a project where such an Interface contract hadn't been created (rush rush, save time....) and - oh wonder - there was in the end a lot of rework required with direct impact on time, cost and quality of the final code.
If it's a once off then using Proc Import with guessingrows set to max, or assigning character lengths which are certainly long enough, or eventually even writing a script which first analysis the strings and then generates the lengths for the input statement dynamycally would work as well.
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