ok, probably my previous reply was somehow misleading, let me reformulate the question: I have a dataset that has a format whose name is 8 characters PLUS the $ sign, meaning it's a string, not a number: value $AAAAAAAA
"1" = "One"
"2" = "Two"
"3" = "Three"
; Now I have to export this dataset in SAS XPT format, version 5, and I use proc copy for this purpose proc copy
in=csvlib
out=xportout
memtype=data
;
run; but I have following error: ERROR: The format name $AAAAAAAA is illegal for file XPORTOUT.DATA.DATA. According to SAS xpt specification (see here) a format name 8 chars long should be acceptable It seems instead that proc copy is counting the $ as one of the char of the name, thus considering as 9 characters long. Tom confirmed this. So my question is, is there some option making proc copy to skip this validation check, or is there an alternative procedure/macro to achive the goal of having the xpt export without modifying the format name?
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