**StudySAS Blog: Mastering Clinical Data Management with SAS**

Resolving the SAS EG Transcoding Error Addressing the "Character Data Lost During Transcoding" Issue in SAS EG Author: Sarath Date: November 19, 2024 Introduction While working in SAS Enterprise Guide (SAS EG), you may encounter the error: "Some character data was lost during transcoding in the dataset." This issue typically arises when character data contains unsupported characters or is truncated due to insufficient column lengths. In this blog post, we'll explore the root causes and provide step-by-step solutions. Common Causes Unsupported Characters: The data contains special or non-ASCII characters not representable in the session encoding. Truncation: Character variables are too short to store the full data, leading to loss of information. ...

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 b...