options colophon= with copyright symbol gives SVG errors

[Peter_L]

In SAS 9.4M5 in Windows 10 64-bit the following gives unparsable SVG graphics:

options colophon="© Company";
ods html5 device=svg options(svg_mode='img');
/* some graphics output */

What you find in the *.svg file is a line like this between desc and defs (line 4):

<!-- © Company -->

In the HTML page which refers to this you may see a broken link symbol or nothing. If you open the SVG file in a browser you may see nothing. If you are lucky (e.g. using Firefox) you will see a parse error message.

I have not tried this with embedded SVG because I need a separate img file.

A workaround is to replace the copyright symbol © with plain ASCII (c) or the word "copyright".

@Sas Please could you fix this minor bug which is very difficult to diagnose.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Have you already brought this to the attention of SAS technical support? If not, do it. It is the avenue for reporting bugs.

[Peter_L]

Yes, I have informed SAS support. This is the fastest way to inform fellow sufferers.

[Peter_L · Accepted solution]

SAS Support has determined that this problem is an interaction with the encoding. When SAS is running with UTF-8 encoding the SVG file also has UTF-8 encoding and the problem does not arise. In wlatin1 encoding the SVG file causes some browser parsers to fail.

I use wlatin1 encoding because UTF-8 does not work for me owing to an incompatibility between SAS and the ODBC driver for SAP SQL Anywhere in UTF-8 mode related to the width of character columns. This has gone via SAS Support to the engineering queue.