During the compilation
phase, use an assignment statement to create a new character variable.
SAS allocates as many bytes of storage space as there are characters
in the first value that it encounters for that variable.
In the following figure,
the variable TestLength has a length of four bytes. The word Short
is truncated because the word Norm uses four bytes.
When you assign a character
constant as the value of the new variable, use the LENGTH statement
to specify a length to avoid truncation of your values.