topic Re: What to do about weird characters in the data in SAS Programming

What to do about weird characters in the data

hein68 — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 21:05:42 GMT

After importing the Excel data into SAS EG it is converting double quotation marks " to some sort of hexadecimal character. This is the error message I get.

217
ERROR 217-322: Invalid statement due to first character being unprintable
(hexadecimal representation: 9D).

Now even after deleting the lines of code involving the variable with the weird data, and even after saving the project and closing out of EG, then reopening EG and running the program, I still get this message.

My program ran fine for the other variables, but now even that doesn't work.

Please help!

Re: What to do about weird characters in the data

ballardw — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 21:21:23 GMT

Almost certainly the character is not the programming " double quote that is on the key board but a pretty version that curls. Which is an entirely different character and would have to see the source file encoding to know what likely value it may be be. May be Unicode or foreign language encoded.

If the file is supposed to be Code, the only reason I can think you would get that particular message that way, then you either need to fix the quote character in the source file before what ever you are doing or at least before attempting to use it as code.

Since you don't show what the lines actually look like it is kind of hard to be more specific.

You might try showing us what the actual code EG is creating/using looks like. better might be to show the entire log for the step getting the errors. If you show code or log you need to copy the lines and paste into the the code box opened on the forum using the </> icon to preserve formatting and to keep the forum from interpreting any odd characters as HTML directives.

Re: What to do about weird characters in the data

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 07:18:33 GMT

It seems you do not have a problem with data, but with code. This kind of ERROR message is simply impossible with using proc import or libname excel to read Excel data.

Please post the complete log of the step causing this ERROR. As @ballardw already advised, use the </> button: