English and Japanese Language Support - Encoding and Locale

[Prakash_Cog]

Dears,

We have Deployed SAS 9.4 M5 Grid solution in Linux (RHEL 7.7) recently.

The Locale = en_US and encoding = latin1 are set accordingly as per .cfg file. 

In one of the business user meeting, they have requested us to also enable Japanese language compatibility, so that SAS EG, SAS Studio can support both the languages.

Please do let us know the steps and procedures to make SAS EG and Studio compatible for both the languages.

Thanks,

Prakash. V

[yabwon]

I would start with adding UTF-8 support, e.g. encoding option set to utf8 in .cfg file or probably better by setting up SAS to run on sas_u8 binary,

Bart

[ehbales]

The Japanese legacy encoding would support English. That requires use of the K functions, longer character columns and extra length for the SAS formats. The same type of SAS code changes have to be made for UTF-8. If you ever need to support an additional language, you would have to update the code again to use UTF-8. I also recommend that route.

The CVP engine can help you pad the character columns on existing SAS data sets. Here are links to some SAS Global Forum papers that provide additional information about making the necessary modification:

• https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2020/4195-2020.pdf
• https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2020/4561-2020.pdf
• https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2018/1902-2018.pdf 
• https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings17/SAS0296-2017.pdf