> I tried the current nightly build
> and it still cuts the variable labels after 255 characters,
> so I can see no change.

Foolishly, I made the change without testing it, so of course it didn't work ;-)

I've now tested it with ZA4813.sav, found the problem, and fixed it.  Please try tomorrow morning's build.

Thanks a lot, I will try this out.

I also found the 256 chars strange, given
a 255 byte limit, but that's not the first
off by one error I found in SPSS docs vs. reality.

Now, for the way longer label (as in 327 chars),
I do suspect the rather crude unicode handling
(and a missing check) may be responsible for
this. I remember reading that for unicode,
SPSS triples all field lengths.
This may lead to accepting entries well beyond
the spec.

The SPSS 22 manual says that variable labels have a 255-byte limit, which is why I've previously resisted increasing the limit.  But since you say you have a file with 327-byte labels, I guess that I can increase it.

PSPP only reads 255 characters of a variable label from sav files.
The label can be up to 256 characters long.
So, this smells like an off by one error.
I found half a dozen instances of this, so this behaviour
looks consistent at a glance.

The character misses both looking at the entry in the psppire gui and the "DISPLAY DICTIONARY" output.

An example dataset is here (needs registration):
https://dbk.gesis.org/dbksearch/download.asp?db=D&id=36757

The entry maxing out is in variable d4a (index 65).