Process Description

Change Lengths

The Change Lengths process enables you to change the lengths of variables in a SAS data set. It can be used to shorten long character variables in order to save disk space and computational time.

Note: This process does not change the lengths of numeric variables.

What do I need?

Any SAS data set containing character variables.

For an example, consider the adsl.sas7bdat data set (found in the \LifeSciences\Sample Data\Nicardipine\ADaM directory included with JMP Genomics and JMP Clinical, and described in Nicardipine). Currently, the length of its ARM variable is 14. This can be verified by running the Column Contents process.

You’d like the length of the ARM variable to be 64.

For detailed information about the files and data sets used or created by JMP Genomics software, see Files and Data Sets.

Output/Results

The output of the Change Lengths process includes the output data set (identified by the _dln suffix), with variables resized as specified, and an .html file that describes the process and lists the length of the values for each of the variables in the output data set.

Using the example data, the ARM variable length has been changed to 64.