topic Re: Symbol conversion to special character in SAS Programming

Symbol conversion to special character

singhsahab — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:45:45 GMT

HI All,

The given string "INFECTIONS -TUBO - NEW OR WORSENING" was converted automatically into "INFECTIONS -TUBO Â€“ NEW OR WORSENING" while connecting SAS to Oracle database. In SAS datasets it is showing right "INFECTIONS -TUBO - NEW OR WORSENING" and in oracle table it is sowing "INFECTIONS -TUBO Â€“ NEW OR WORSENING".

Can you please suggest how to prevent such type of conversion ?

Thank you in advance !!

Re: Symbol conversion to special character

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:53:08 GMT

Use a $hex. format, so you can see what is actually stored. Your second hyphen is most probably not a standard hyphen, but a UTF character.

Re: Symbol conversion to special character

ChrisNZ — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:14:25 GMT

So many answers already on the web.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9773995/bad-encoding-why-does-my-medium-sized-dash-is-differently-encoded-on-another-se

http://community.teradata.com/t5/Database/Seeing-Junk-character-when-inserting-hyphen/td-p/27271

From the second link: "That combination of characters is the 3-byte UTF-8 representation of EN DASH U+2013, misinterpreted as Windows-1252. In short, you are loading UTF-8 data using ASCII as the session character set."

As @Kurt_Bremser said, you are mixing encodings.

Either you match the encodings of your Oracle data and your SAS data, or more likely you just clean your SAS strings to remove any non-latin characters.

This should work, I can't test as my session is WLATIN1.

STR=prxchange('s/[^[:ascii:]]/ /', -1, STR );