I have experienced this unhelpful message: it occurs for me when the number of characters in the first line of the file (variable names) in longer than ~32,000. Essentially, it reads those first 32k characters and those variables names come through to the SAS dataset correctly. SAS gives up for the other variable names and just names them var0001.... One work around for this is to -cut- up the input text file by columns using a command line tool (e.g. cut in linux) so that SAS can read in the manageable chunks, then merge those SAS datasets together. SAS doesn't hit a limit with my data in terms of having that number of variables, just a flawed proc import. PS. I'm using SAS 9.3
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