topic SAS OnDemand: é character requires 2 bytes! in SAS Programming

SAS OnDemand: é character requires 2 bytes!

xxformat_com — Sun, 08 May 2022 16:01:56 GMT

Hi,

When using SAS OnDemand, the é character is automatically interpreted as 'C3A9'x i.e. requires 2 bytes.

When using the exact same code with SAS Studio from SAS Analytics, it is interpreted as 'E9'x from the extended ASCII table and therefore only requires one byte (which is what I would expect).

Do you know why SAS OnDemand goes for a 2-byte value ?

Cheers

Re: SAS OnDemand: é character requires 2 bytes!

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 08 May 2022 16:07:44 GMT

Because On Demand runs with UTF encoding, and E9 is not available there, as it is a start byte for a UTF sequence.

Re: SAS OnDemand: é character requires 2 bytes!

xxformat_com — Sun, 08 May 2022 17:05:14 GMT

Thanks @Kurt_Bremser

I'm missing background encoding knowledge to understand what "as it is a start byte for a UTF sequence." means.

But on my local SAS Studio installation, I'm also using UTF-8. Did you mean this setting or something else?

Re: SAS OnDemand: é character requires 2 bytes!

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 08 May 2022 17:15:09 GMT

Study this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

Run this in your environments.

proc options option=encoding;
run;

and compare the logs.

Re: SAS OnDemand: é character requires 2 bytes!

xxformat_com — Sun, 08 May 2022 17:27:02 GMT

After reading the you comment I've start reading the Wikipedia page and came up with more questions (I will create a distinct post for one of them).

Thanks for the code. I didn't thought about looking in the global options.

So also SAS Studio shows UTF-8, WLATIN1 is actually used.

Thanks!