topic Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???' in SAS Enterprise Guide

Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

ICL1986 — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 08:44:24 GMT

I'm running queries across a pretty large dataset, but there seems to be an issue with the processing, so 20-30 rows of the query output come out with all columns as '???'. I've looked back to the source data, and there doesn't seem to be a problem there. Anyone have any ideas?

Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

RW9 — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:13:31 GMT

Are those columns numerics formatted, such as dates, datetimes etc. That is where you normally get this where the width of the column is not big enough to show the full formatted value of an underlying numeric data. If you look at the dataset and move the column width it should show.

Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

ICL1986 — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:17:36 GMT

The '???' is across all columns, regardless of data type and length, and the results above and below are displaying normally. As a bit of further information, when I'm scrolling through the data, it seems to pause slightly before getting to the data with the '???'. Not sure if this helps.

Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

ChrisHemedinger — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 12:07:57 GMT

I'm guessing that this might be an encoding problem. The original data might contain some national characters that don't fit in your SAS session encoding, so the representation of these chars is "?". If you can, try running your SAS session with ENCODING=UTF8 (that might be an admin task to set up).

SAS Enterprise Guide is a full Unicode application, so virtually all character sets can be represented. But the SAS session is often pinned to one codepage or encoding, so information is literally "lost in translation". UTF-8 (a form of Unicode) is the best option for SAS sessions.

Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

ICL1986 — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:48:55 GMT

Thanks,

I'm currently set up for the utf-8 encoding so that shouldn't be an issue. I've managed to isolate the column with the data that appears to be screwing things up. It occaisionally contains cyrillic characters, and seems to be imported in from the source excel files without any issues, but then has issues after querying.

Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

ChrisHemedinger — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:14:59 GMT

Any user-defined formats applied to that column, by chance? Does a small PROC PRINT to HTML produce the same output? Or is this limited to the data grid view?

Re: Results in Enterprise Guide '???'

ICL1986 — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 10:56:52 GMT

Hmm, it's really odd but even when changing the default results settings to HTML, the report will only produce the data grid.