Question

I am exporting an SAS Data Set to an xpt file using the following code but the variable names are truncated to length 8. Is there anything I can do to keep the full names?

libname target xport 'C:\temp\test.xpt';
proc copy in=work out=target;
 select data;
run;

Answer 1

XPort files have length 8 maximum for variable names – they’re intended to be highly compatible with earlier versions of SAS as well as other software, and in both cases 8 is a safe maximum.

See http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/movefile/59598/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a001027644.htm for more details on the limitations of the XPORT feature.

What are you trying to do with your data? There might be a safer/easier way to get it from SAS to what you want while preserving variable names.