On unidata 8.2.1

My objective is to assign a string of characters (xml code) to a variable, and then write said variable as a record on a sequential file.  However, I get the following error when attempting to compile the program if the length of the string exceeds  ~2K (I'm not certain of what that limit is precisely):

It will successfully compile as long as I break up the string in chunks that stay under the limit.

However, the same program has no issues reading in a string, the length of which is over 80K characters.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.