Limiting character size of source column

Hi,

I'm having a bit of an issue, i'm parsing through an XML source and receiving a truncation error when trying to output the column value because this particular string is more than 8000 characters, which is the maximum size that DT_STR will allow, is there a way that I can limit the column value to only take the first 8000 characters or would i have to put that limit in the XSL that i use to parse the XML file? any help on this problem would be greatly appreciated