Declares variables and specifies their length and whether their
data type is numeric or character
| Category: |
Declarative Statement
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| Comparisons: |
SAS Statement with limitations in
SCL
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LENGTH<variable-list><DEFAULT=n>;
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variable-list
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is one or more variables, specified as variable-1 <. . . variable-n> <$> length, where
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variable
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names a variable to be assigned a length.
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$
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designates that the preceding variable or
variables are character type.
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length
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is the length of the preceding variable
or variables. Length can range from 1 to 32,767
for character variables. All numeric variables have a length of 8. If you
specify a different length for a numeric variable, SCL still reserves 8 bytes
for it.
Type: Character
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DEFAULT=n
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is the maximum length of character variables
that are not defined by a LENGTH statement. If this option is not used, the
default length for character variables is 200.
Type: Numeric
In SCL, LENGTH is a declarative statement and can be
used only to set the lengths of nonwindow variables. If you attempt to specify
a length for a window variable, a compile error occurs.
You typically place LENGTH statements at the beginning
of a program, before the first labeled section. A compiler error occurs if
you attempt to place a LENGTH statement within a DO group or within a conditional
clause.
You can use the LENGTH statement to reduce the amount
of memory required for storing character-type nonwindow variables. For example,
if your program assigns only single-character values to the variable CODE,
and if the default length of character variables is 200, then you can save
199 bytes of storage space by defining the length of the variable explicitly
in the SCL program. To do so, use a statement like the following:
length code $ 1;
For details about the LENGTH statement in the base SAS
language, see SAS Language Reference: Dictionary
.
Set the maximum length of all character variables that
are not defined by a LENGTH statement to 150:
length default=150;
length a $ 8;
INIT:
b='';
max_a=mlength(a);
max_b=mlength(b);
put max_a= max_b=;
return;
The output is:
max_a=8 max_b=150
DECLARE
Copyright © 1999 by SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved.
