Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

Length of a variable

Prior to attempting any character manipulation, an important aspect to understand is how length is assigned for character variables. Let's look at the following character variable default length example:

DATA Cars;INPUT Make $;DATALINES;Porsche_CayenneAudiBMW;PROC CONTENTS;RUN;

Using PROC CONTENTS, we get the following output:

Even though, in the first observation, we have has 15 characters, the output of the first observation will get restricted to Porsche_ (the first eight characters) due to the default length of 8 for the character variable. In Chapter 1, Introduction to SAS Programming, we specified the length of the ...