The example you show below is straight out of the documentation:

<http://support.sas.com/onlinedoc/913/getDoc/en/lrdict.hlp/a000193602.htm>

You should send email to support@sas.com asking them to improve the documentation if you don't think it's sufficient. I agree that the documentation is a bit murky, but working through the two examples should make it clear.

"input x 1." reads "3" from the input line and stores it as the number 3 in the variable X.

"name $varying9. x" reads the next portion of the input line into variable NAME. How much does it read? The number of characters specified in variable X. You just set the value of X to 3, so it reads 3 characters. If x equals 3, then "$varying9. x" reads 3 characters. If x equals 8, "$varying9. x" reads 8 characters.

On Nov 26, 2010, at 9:55 , bbser2009 wrote:

> Here are two questions about the code below: > 1. Why the value for the variable name is the string "sun" instead of > "sunfish"? > 2. What's the purpose for listing the second x in the input statement? > > Thanks. Max > > data temp; > input x 1. name $varying9. x; > cards; > 3sunfish > ; > proc print; > run; > > Result of this code: > > obs x name > 1 3 sun