A SAS name can be up to 8 characters long. It must begin with a letter or underscore (_), and subsequent characters can be letters, numbers, or underscores. We recommend that you not use an underscore as the first character in a SAS name to avoid conflicting with variable names that SAS/LAB software has reserved.
Examples of valid SAS names include WEIGHT, WGT1, WGT_1, _WGT1, and WGT1_EX.
Examples of invalid SAS names include *WEIGHT, 1WGT, and HGT+WGT.
SAS names are used to name SAS data sets, catalogs, variables, and other SAS objects.