topic Re: Unicode SAS RTF output issue in SAS Programming

Unicode SAS RTF output issue

Bill3 — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 10:32:06 GMT

Hi communities, I encountered some coding problems, I don't know if this is a bug.

Background:

Using ODS RTF procedure, the Unicode SAS outputed a RTF file, but the title/author/last modifier of MS Word is garbled.

Re: Unicode SAS RTF output issue

Bill3 — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 10:33:09 GMT

my language is chinese

Re: Unicode SAS RTF output issue

Tom — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 14:41:17 GMT

Are you saying that when you open the RTF file in WORD (so that WORD will convert it into a WORD file) and then check the Author attributes the text looks like it might have been transcoded incorrectly?

To see if the problem is with SAS's generation of the RTF file or with WORD's reading of the RTF file examine the RTF file using a TEXT editor.

Re: Unicode SAS RTF output issue

Bill3 — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 01:37:20 GMT

\info{\title \'E7\'89\'88\'E6\'9C\'AC 9.4 SAS \'E7\'B3\'BB\'E7\'BB\'9F\'E8\'BE\'93\'E5\'87\'BA}{\author SAS \'E7\'89\'88\'E6\'9C\'AC 9.4}{\operator SAS \'E7\'89\'88\'E6\'9C\'AC 9.4} I think this UTF8 cannot be recognized in MS Word？

Re: Unicode SAS RTF output issue

whymath — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 02:09:42 GMT

It should be the same reason said by Yinliang Wu: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2023/08/31/review-garbage-characters-in-rtf-output-on-unicode-sas/

This paper gives a solution to output right Chinese text when using pretext= or posttext= option in UTF8 enviroment, but no document info mentioned here.

To mannually set document info, you can use title=, author= and operator= options in ods rtf statement. Very luckily, these options will output right Chinese characters rather than garbage characters, which are produced by omitting these options.