SAS Companion for the OS/2 Environment

Character Variables

In the SAS System under OS/2, character values are sorted using the ASCII collating sequence. As an alternative to the numeric dummy variables discussed previously, you can choose a character variable with a length of 1 byte to serve the same purpose.

The maximum number of variables in a single SAS data set under OS/2 is 32,767. In addition, an observation under OS/2 cannot be longer than 5M. Therefore, if you want your data set to contain 32,767 character variables, the longest each variable can be is 160 bytes.

However, a DATA step can reference more than 32,767 variables, if you write only 32,767 or fewer variables to the data set. For example, you could drop some variables with a DROP= data set option. Under OS/2, the maximum number of variables a DATA step can reference is 2,147,483,647.

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