Failed to transcode data

[clairep]

Completing SAS ENTERPRISE GUIDE: 1 querying and reporting (8.2) lessons on getting started. demo: Navigating the SAS Enterprise Guide Environment. When i try to characterize the data from the lesson i am getting this error message: “FAILED TO TRANSCODE DATA FROM U_UTF8_CE TO U_LATIN9_CE ENCODING BECAUSE IT CONTAINED CHARACTERS WHICH ARE NOT SUPPORTED BY YOUR SAS SESSION ENCODING”
What does this mean and how can i fix?? Thanks

[Tom · Accepted solution]

The SAS session your Enterprise Guide front end tool is connected to is using a single byte encoding (LATIN1).  So there are only 2**8 = 256 possible characters that can be represented.  The data you are reading is using a flexible-byte encoding (UTF-8) that can represent millions of characters.  At least one of the characters in your data does not exist in set of 256 characters that the LATIN1 supports.

The solution is to change the SAS session that your Enterprise Guide project is using to one that is running "SAS with unicode support".  Basically a SAS session that is using UTF-8 as the encoding.  Now you can read data that is using UTF-8 encode or data that is using LATIN1 since any character that is in LATIN1 can be mapped to a character in UTF-8.

[clairep]

Hi Tom, thanks for responding. How do I do this? Thanks