topic Where can I visually verify Unicode data? in SAS Programming

Where can I visually verify Unicode data?

igjarjuk — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 12:55:27 GMT

Hello,

I have created a SAS dataset with a value that contains a UTF8 encoded string. How can I verify that the data has come across correctly? I have tried to open the SAS dataset in the

SAS Universal Viewer

Release 9.4 - SEP 2014

but it only renders the squares that indicate the character is missing in the current font.

I am using the Universal Viewer because our licensed version on linux does not display unicode. All I can see is the strange garbled sequence of accented A's and such.

If there is no way to visually inspect that the unicode data is correctly encoded is there any procedure you would recommend to validate the data has come across correctly?

Thanks,

sJared

Re: Where can I visually verify Unicode data?

Tom — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 13:18:39 GMT

Make sure that you are running SAS with Unicode support. Your admin might need to make a new command for you to use that points at the proper configuration file.

Even with that I suspect that your issue is with Display Manager on Unix.

You could instead use SAS/Studio and it would allow you to open a dataset in a pseudo interactive mode with Unicode support.

Or just use ODS HTML (or PDF) and print the data and then open the report.

Re: Where can I visually verify Unicode data?

igjarjuk — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 13:24:10 GMT

Sorry, I should have been a little clearer. I used the SAS Universal view on Windows because I know unix windowing isn't the best for supporting unicode. Is that also expected not to work?

When you say SAS with Unicode support you mean the executable thats named sas_u8 right?

Would the ODS output also be dependent on creating it from a SAS with Unicode support session?

Can you give an example procedure that should ensure a utf8 compatible font is used for PDF output? I think this would be sufficient for my validation purposes.