ENCODING=Dataset Option

Let me explain the reason writing this post….

My coworker was having problem reading in a SAS dataset that he got from the Sponsor. It was a SAS dataset encoded with UTF-8 and other coding related stuff.

When he tried to get in the rawdata using Libname statement

libname rawdata  ‘/sas/SAS913/SASDATA/CLIENT /ABC123/raw’;

data datasetname;

set rawdata.datasetname;

run;

When he runs the SAS code above, SAS stops at the current block, and returns an error that looks like this:

ERROR: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the dataset RAWDATA.DATSETNAME.

NOTE: The data step has been abnormally terminated.

NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors.

NOTE: SAS set option OBS=0 and will continue to check statements. This may cause NOTE: No observations in data set.

NOTE: There were 20314 observations read from the data set RAWDATA.DATSETNAME.

WARNING: The data set WORK.DATASETNAME may be incomplete.  When this step was stopped there were 20314 observations and

         67 variables.

NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):

      real time           0.53 seconds

      cpu time            0.46 seconds

When he asked me why SAS stops in the middle, we were quick in taking the help of GOOGLE because we never saw this kind of ERROR message in the log. Unfortunately, the GOOGLE showed us so many links which has all the technical details. There were few options we saw in those links and nothing worked.  So after so many trials, we stumbled upon a way or we can say the solution, using ASCIIANY as the encoding option in the LIBNAME statement.
 

libname rawdata  ‘/sas/SAS913/SASDATA/CLIENT /ABC123/raw’ inencoding=asciiany;

If you have only one dataset to use or you know the name of the dataset which has the encoding problem you could use the simple datastep too. Here is how…

data datasetname;set rawdata.datasetname (encoding='asciiany');
run;

If you refer to the SAS reference Guide, you will see this, which explains how this option works….

Syntax

ENCODING= ANY | ASCIIANY | EBCDICANY | encoding-value

Syntax Description

ANY

specifies that no transcoding occurs.

Note: ANY is a synonym for binary. Because the data is binary, the actual encoding is irrelevant.

ASCIIANY

specifies that no transcoding occurs when the mixed encodings are ASCII encodings.

Transcoding normally occurs when SAS detects that the session encoding and data set encoding are different. ASCIIANY enables you to create a data set that SAS will not transcode if the SAS session that accesses the data set has a session that encoding value of ASCII. If you transfer the data set to a machine that uses EBCDIC encoding, transcoding occurs.

EBCDICANY

specifies that no transcoding occurs when the mixed encodings are EBCDIC encodings.

Details

The value for ENCODING= indicates that the SAS data set has a different encoding from the current session encoding. When you read data from a data set, SAS transcodes the data from the specified encoding to the session encoding. When you write data to a data set, SAS transcodes the data from the session encoding to the specified encoding.

For more details refer to the documentation….

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/nlsref/61893/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a002601996.htm

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/nlsref/61893/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a002601996.htm